The Borgo Holy Infirmary, now The St. Scholastica Convent

Abstract

These notes on the Old Borgo Infirmary, the first hospital built in these Islands by the Knights of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, have led me also to look up the history of the Nuns of St. Scholastica; an agreeable diversion, which should prove equally so to those who sniff at exhumations of any sort, even if not ordered by the Police and were apt only to rouse a little harmless archaic dust. Some years ago I had occasion to write of a Convent, the St. Mary Magdalen's, in Valletta, that was turned into a Hospital and served as such for more than fifty years. This time it was a Hospital that became a Convent and has now been so for nearly three hundred years. In repeating itself history, of course, is free to invert the sequence of events; but the inversion in this case excited my curiosity. The above, I fear, will not go a long way towards inducing people to waste time over the description of an old building; what might perhaps condone its appearance in print is that, to my knowledge, nothing has been written so far about this old Infirmary and the hope that some more diligent and lucky student of the institutional and artistic heritage left to us by the Order may add his to my unavoidably scrappy notes, spring-clean them of all unnecessary cobwebs and recast them into a whole more likely to hold the attention of the busy unsophisticated reader.