April 23, 2007 — Visitors drank wine from privately held cellars, ate food cooked from ingredients grown on the premises, received compassionate care and stayed in beautiful facilities surrounded by manicured gardens and artwork created by European masters.
This was not a fine hotel, but rather what hospital life was like in many places during the Renaissance, according to history professor John Henderson of the University of London.
In an upcoming presentation this May at the University of Verona, Henderson will explain why "the traditional image of pre-modern hospitals as hellholes where people were taken to die has been overturned." The care must have seemed especially good to poorer patients in Italy at the time.
"Hospitals in this period provided free treatment, a warm environment and specialized care, which they would not have found in the community," Henderson told Discovery News.
He explained that population growth and development in countries such as Italy, Spain and France led to the establishment of major charitable foundations that not only constructed medical hospitals, but also foundling hospitals for abandoned children and specialized isolation hospitals for victims of epidemics, such as plague and syphilis.
In his book "The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul," Henderson mentions that the general care facilities had a low 5-10 percent mortality rate.
A Journal of Advanced Nursing study conducted earlier this year by the University of Toronto and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Ontario, Canada, looked at mortality rates for patients admitted with heart attacks, stroke, pneumonia and blood poisoning. The average mortality rate was 17 percent.
Henderson said Renaissance hospitals, particularly in Florence, believed in manipulating the "non-naturals," things like diet, rest, sex and the environment, "to keep a body healthy."
An early 16th century document describes care at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova hospital. It mentions how the infirm could ring a bell to receive service, which included drinking wines from the hospital’s cellar.
"While the sick are eating, three servants go round the ward serving excellent wine. Each person receives an appropriate amount of particular wine — white, red, smooth, sweet or dry — suited to his illness or appetite," it reads.
