Rise of the Modern Hospital is a focused examination of hospital design in the United States from the 1870s through the 1940s. This understudied period witnessed profound changes in hospitals as they shifted from last charitable resorts for the sick poor to premier locations of cutting-edge medical treatment for all classes, and from low-rise decentralized facilities to high-rise centralized structures. Jeanne Kisacky reveals the changing role of the hospital within the city, the competing claims of doctors and architects for expertise in hospital design, and the influence of new medical theories and practices on established traditions. She traces the dilemma designers faced between creating an environment that could function as a therapy in and of itself and an environment that was essentially a tool for the facilitation of increasingly technologically assisted medical procedures. Heavily illustrated with floor plans, drawings, and photographs, this book considers the hospital building as both a cultural artifact, revelatory of external medical and social change, and a cultural determinant, actively shaping what could and did take place within hospitals.

More than any other building type in the twentieth century, the hospital was connected to transformations in the health of populations and expectations of lifespan. From the scale of public health to the level of the individual, the architecture of the modern hospital has reshaped knowledge about health and disease and perceptions of bodily integrity and security. However, the rich and genuinely global architectural history of these hospitals is poorly understood and largely forgotten. This book explores the rapid evolution of hospital design in the twentieth century, analysing the ways in which architects and other specialists reimagined the modern hospital. It examines how the vast expansion of medical institutions over the course of the century was enabled by new approaches to architectural design and it highlights the emerging political conviction that physical health would become the cornerstone of human welfare.

In the history of medicine, hospitals are usually seen as passive reflections of advances in medical knowledge and technology. In Medicine by Design, Annmarie Adams challenges these assumptions, examining how hospital design influenced the development of twentieth-century medicine and demonstrating the importance of these specialized buildings in the history of architecture. At the center of this work is Montreal’s landmark Royal Victoria Hospital, built in 1893. Drawing on a wide range of visual and textual sources, Adams uses the “Royal Vic”—along with other hospitals built or modified over the next fifty years—to explore critical issues in architecture and medicine: the role of gender and class in both fields, the transformation of patients into consumers, the introduction of new medical concepts and technologies, and the use of domestic architecture and regionally inspired imagery to soften the jarring impact of high-tech medicine. Identifying the roles played by architects in medical history and those played by patients, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the design of hospitals, Adams also links architectural spaces to everyday hospital activities, from meal preparation to the ways in which patients entered the hospital and awaited treatment. Methodologically and conceptually innovative, Medicine by Design makes a significant contribution to the histories of both architectural and medical practices in the twentieth century. Annmarie Adams is William C. Macdonald Professor of Architecture at McGill University and the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 and coauthor of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession.

Architecture of Health is a story about the design and life of hospitals-about how they are born and evolve, about the forces that give them shape, and the shifts that conspire to render them inadequate. Reading architecture through the history of hospitals is a deciphering tool for unlocking the elemental principles of architecture and the intractable laws of human and social conditions that architecture serves in each of our lives.This book encounters brilliant and visionary designers who were hospital architects but also systems designers, driven by the aim of social change. They faced the contradictions of health care in their time and found innovative ways to solve for specific medical dilemmas. Less-known designers like Filarete, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Albert Schweitzer, Max Fry and Jane Drew, John Dawe Tetlow, Gordon Friesen, Thomas Wheeler, and Eberhard Zeidler are studied here, while the medical spaces of more widely-known architects like Isambard Brunel, Aalvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Paul Rudolph also help inform this history. All these characters were polymaths and provocateurs, but none quite summarizes this history more succinctly than Florence Nightingale, who in laying out her guidelines for ward design in 1859, shows how the design of a medical facility can influence an entire political and social order.Architecture of Health, richly illustrated with images and never before published renderings and drawings from the MASS Design Group, charts historical epidemics alongside modern and contemporary architectural transformations in service of medicine, health, and habitation; it explores how infrastructure facilitates healing and architecture's greater role in constructing our societies.

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture addresses hospital architecture as a set of interlocked, overlapping spatial and social conditions. It identifies ways that planned-for and latent functions of hospital spaces work jointly to produce desired outcomes such as greater patient safety, increased scope for care provider communication and more intelligible corridors. By advancing space syntax theory and methods, the volume brings together emerging research on hospital environments. Opening with a description of hospital architecture that emphasizes everyday relations, the sequence of chapters takes an unusually comprehensive view that pairs spaces and occupants in hospitals: the patient room and its intervisibility with adjacent spaces, care teams and on-ward support for their work and the intelligibility of public circulation spaces for visitors. The final chapter moves outside the hospital to describe the current healthcare crisis of the global pandemic as it reveals how healthcare institutions must evolve to be adaptable in entirely new ways. Reflective essays by practicing designers follow each chapter, bringing perspectives from professional practice into the discussion. The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture makes the case that latent dimensions of space as experienced have a surprisingly strong link to measurable outcomes, providing new insights into how to better design hospitals through principles that have been tested empirically. It will become a reference for healthcare planners, designers, architects and administrators, as well as for readers from sociology, psychology and other areas of the social sciences.

The rapidly growing developments in medicine and science in the last few decades has evoked a greater need for modern institutions, with modern medicine, advanced technologies, and cutting edge research. Today, the modern hospital is a highly competitive, multibillion dollar industry that plays a large role in our healthcare systems. Far different from older institutions, modern hospitals juggle the dynamics of running a business that proves financially fruitful and sustainable, with maintaining and staying ahead of medical developments and offering the best possible patient care. This comprehensive book explores all aspects of the inner workings of a modern hospital, from research and technology driven treatment and patient centered care, to the organizational, functional, architectural, and ergonomic aspects of the business. The text is organized into three parts. The first part covers a number of important aspects of the modern hospital including hospital transformation over the centuries, the new medical world order, overall concept, academic mission and economics of new healthcare. Additionally, experts in the field address issues such as modern design functionally and creating an environment that is ergonomically friendly, technologically advanced, and easy to navigate for both worker and patient. Other topics covered include, the role of genomics and nano-technologies, controversies that come with introducing new technologies, the world-wide pharmaceutical industry, electronic medical health records, informatics, and quality of patient care. Part II addresses nine specific elements of modernization of the hospital that deal with high acuity, life and death situations, and complex medical and surgical diseases. These chapters cover the organization of new emergency departments, trauma room, hybrid operating rooms, intensive care units, radiology, pharmaceutical and nutritional support, and most essential, patient and public relation services. These nine elements reflect the most important and most visible indicators of modernization and transformation of the hospital. Part III examines and highlights the team approach as a crucial component of the transformation, as well as specific perspectives on the modern hospital from nurses, physicians, surgeons and administrators. Finally, a chapter dedicated to patient perspective is also presented. The Modern Hospital provides an all-inclusive review of the hospital industry. It will serve as a valuable resource for administrators, clinicians, surgeons, nurses, and researchers. All chapters will be written by practicing experts in their fields and include the most up-to-date scientific and clinical information.