Although Exodus describes a perfect landscape as one that flows with milk and honey, and the writer of Revelations sees it as the perfect sweet food, there is little, if anything, in the Bible to extol honey’s therapeutic uses. This is surprising, because both the Romans and the Greeks valued honey as a medicine and a food. Roman hosts are said to have offered it as a god-given elixir to restore weary travellers, and Greek athletes were recommended to take it to improve their Olympic performances.

The Romans also used honey to treat wounds. They had discovered that some types of honey have an antiseptic and antibacterial property.

The use of honey as a dressing for recalcitrant wounds has continued to this century. When I started in practice in Norfolk, the late Mr Michael Bulman, the senior obstetrician and gynaecologist in Norwich, disdained modern antibiotics and swore that there was no dressing like a honey mixture to ensure rapid healing of surgical incisions and perineal wounds acquired in the delivery room.

My patients were sceptical. Having been through the discomfort of childbirth, they wanted to sample every latest medical advance, and this didn’t include sitting on a sticky dressing of melting honey.

Honey’s role in medicine is now back, if indeed it ever went away. There are as many different types of honey as there are flowers from which the bees may have been feeding. Honey contains nearly 200 organic chemicals, but what gives some honey its antibacterial properties is an unsolved mystery. If it hadn’t been for the menace of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it is probable that the enthusiasm of Ancient Romans, Greeks and Mr Bulman for the healing powers of honey might have been to allowed to slip into oblivion. Now doctors are studying honey for possible remedies against resistant bacteria.

What could account for honey’s antibacterial action? The old story is that it can destroy the water balance of bacteria by changing the osmotic pressure around them with its acidity and sugar content. Honey also produces hydrogen peroxide, another traditional antiseptic, by the action of gluconic acid. But neither of these explanations seems likely to provide the whole answer that would account for honey’s now clinically proven antibacterial powers. Although the pharmacological properties of all its many constituents are being explored, it will be years before they are understood.

Whatever the reasons why honey works, and why different honeys have different medicinal actions, it is accepted that the type of flower on which the bees have been feeding is important and can affect the medicinal quality of honey. Left to itself, a bee can pollinate 18,000 flowers a day, so if a pure honey is to be obtained, careful control is needed. Honey also needs to be aseptic: unlike jam or marmalade it is not readily colonised by bacteria and fungi, but it can become infected so it should not be given to children aged under one year, who have an underdeveloped immune system, lest it carries clostridium.

Honey may turn crystalline with age but does not usually go mouldy in the larder.

Over the centuries honey has been used to treat everything from sore throats and coughs, conjunctivitis and corneal damage to fungal infections and dry skin, and as a facial softener. Research is under way into its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant powers. Paradoxically, honey has also been recommended to treat both constipation and diarrhoea, sleepiness and insomnia, but its only scientifically proven use is as an antibacterial wound dressing. It is especially useful in cases of slow healing of odorous wounds, such as leg ulcers.

People are not recommended to raid their larder to treat their grandmother’s varicose ulcers with the honey left over from breakfast. Rather, they should buy specially prepared and selected blends of honeys known to have a high antibacterial activity.

Evidence has shown that honey produced from the New Zealand and Australian manuka bush, one of the leptospermum species, is a useful source of medicinal honey. It is imported to Britain by Medihoney (0800 0713912).