The Sacra Infermeria: An Unbroken Commitment to ‘Ospitalita’s’: The Quality of Care provided by the Order of St John in their last decades on Malta

Louis Bellizzi is a retired chartered accountant and businessman. In 2010, he began reading for an M.A. in Hospitaller Studies at the University of Malta. His researched thesis focussed on life in the Sacra Infermeria in the latter part of the eighteenth century based on the details disclosed by what he was to discover to be a very accomplished accounting system used to manage the Order’s finances.

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“The Order of St John viewed every patient as Christ and as such the sick and poor were treated in the best and most luxurious way possible, this being the staple of Hospitaller Care” (J. Riley Smith). Was this assertion still valid in the last decades of the Order on Malta? John Howard, the British legendary pioneer of prison reform visited the Sacra Infermeria in 1786. He reports finding dusty pictures, dirty kettles, a dark and offensive kitchen and ‘proof of inattention to cleanliness and airiness’. The patients, he wrote ‘were served by the most dirty, ragged, unfeeling and inhuman persons I ever saw’. Possibly his worst indictment is that the Grand Master’s stables were far better kept than the hospital, implying a heinous betrayal of their vows, long traditions and the very reason for which they existed. After a brief description of what the Order’s accounting records disclosed about conditions in the hospital, Howard’s report will be examined closely and interpreted within the context of what the accounts reveal.

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