Monday, July 07, 2008

Hotel service

I heard a man on the radio this morning say that a new Marie Curie hospice had been described as being like a 5 star hotel. It did not sound as if it had been meant entirely as a complimentary remark

That reminded me of something I had been meaning to muse about in a post sometime

How the Victorians coped with ill health & sickness

In particular, hospitals were for the poor. Gave them an improvement on the conditions they lived in at home. Or, in the case of Florence Nightingales campaigns, in the barracks

The rich or comfortably off might have gone into a nursing home but even these were rare. Mostly they were looked after in the comfort of their home

Or in a hotel if they needed a real specialist, say for cancer, which only Harley Street & visits to London could provide

I do not know if this was just considered part of what a hotel was there for, if they all expected to be catering for guests who were ill, or if it was a speciality for them too

But at least 2 of the men whose Manchester lives I researched had been living most of their last few months in an hotel in London