Todays report on Hospital Food Standards emphasises the struggle we seem to have providing good food to modern patients: yet medieval patients got personalised diets, fresh figs, local honey and chicken in saffron stew, so whats gone wrong?Looking at the records of food supplied to medieval and early modern hospitals across Europe and the Middle-East might make a modern NHS patient envious. Last year, at a conference on the history of hospital food, I learnt that patients in 8th century Islamic hospitals (Bimaristans) could expect fresh fruit from a courtyard garden, and that patients in the 12th Century Hospital of St John of Jerusalem were served chicken with saffron. Some of the poor sick seem to have been given such vast quantities of bread and wine that they may have been able to sell the spare food to earn a bit of money while in hospital. And this review of leper hospitals in the eighteenth century says that the lepers at Scio (the Greek island Chios) had their own gardens supply them with almonds, pot-herbs, and delicious figs and grapes.This sounds fantastic, so whats gone wrong with hospital food? Continue reading...
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