Hospital Food, 1785.

Before I put it temporarily aside, I want to give you a little more from Food in Health and Disease , published in London in 1785 by Isaac Burney Yeo (Professor of Clinical Therapeutics in King’s College, London, and Physician to King’s College Hospital.)  For those of you who have ever experienced hospital food, or are involved in its preparation- this post is especially for you.

Yeo gave the dietary tables and recipes for a number of British hospitals: I give you his record for the London Hospital.

Admission Diet. (For all patients on admission, unless otherwise ordered) – Bread, 12 oz.; milk, 2 pints;  beef-tea, 1 pint.

For Children. – Bread, 8 oz; milk, 1 pint; beef-tea, ½ pint.

Full Diet. – Bread, 12oz; potatoes, 8 oz.; meat, 6 oz.; porter or milk, 1 pint.

Middle Diet. - Bread, 12oz; potatoes, 8 oz.; meat, 4 oz.; porter or milk, ½ pint.

Fever Diet. – Milk, 2 pints; beef-tea, 1 pint.

Children’s Diet. – Bread, 8 oz; potatoes, 6 oz.; meat, 2 oz.; milk, 1 pint.

Hydro-carbon Diet. - Bread, 12oz.; fat bacon, 4 oz.; milk, 1 pint; pudding (arrowroot, 1 oz; yolks of 2 eggs, milk, 1pint.)

Diabetic Diet. – Gluten bread, 6 oz.; meat, 6 oz.; watercress; gluten bread pudding (soak 1 oz. gluten bread in ½ pint milk for an hour, beat it up with an egg, and 1 oz. gluten flour, then put mixture into a mould, and bake it.)

Special Diet. – Mutton chop, or beef steak (8 oz. uncooked); or fish (10 oz. uncooked,) with, in each case, bread, 12 oz.; potatoes, 8 oz.; and milk or porter, 1 pint, as ordered.

Ordinary beef-tea is made with 8 oz. meat to the pint.

Elsewhere in the text, Yeo gives a recipe for almond cakes as a substitute for ordinary bread for diabetics (acknowledging that these were not popular with French medical authorities, who preferred a small quantity of ordinary bread to be used.)

Take of blanched sweet almonds ¼ lb., beat them as fine as possible in a stone mortar; remove the sugar contained in this meal by putting it into a linen bag and steeping it for a quarter of an hour in boiling water acidulated with vinegar; mix this paste thoroughly with 3 oz. of butter and 2 eggs. Next add the yolks of 3 eggs and a little salt, and stir well for some time. Whip up the whites of these eggs and stir in. Put the dough thus obtained into greased moulds, and dry by a slow fire.