Book

Stevenson, Christine, author.

Medicine and magnificence : British hospital and asylum architecture, 1660-1815 / Christine Stevenson.

New Haven ; London : Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, [2000]

viii, 312 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm

"An architectural historian, Christine Stevenson looks beyond the intrinsic value of hospital design to consider what the buildings meant to architects, builders, donors, physicians and the public, and how these meanings and functions changed. Blending social history with the details of construction, she explores views of the appropriateness of architectural display in buildings for paupers and invalids, the importance of the circulation of air for the prevention of cross-infection, the preoccupation with segregation by sex, class and diagnosis, and the provision of such 'true magnificence' as facilities for exercise. In the final analysis, Stevenson argues, hospital planning attempted to reconcile man's works with that of God.

By bringing to life those involved in designing and working the institutions and those attacking them too, she offers a view of architectural, cultural and medical practice in the period as a whole."-- Jacket.

Hospital architecture -- Great Britain -- History.

Asylums -- Great Britain -- Design and construction -- History.

Hospital buildings -- Great Britain -- Design and construction -- History.

Health facilities -- Great Britain -- Design and construction -- History.

Medicine -- History -- 17th century.

Medicine -- History -- 18th century.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-306) and index.

Hospitality, monuments, and patriarchal medicine II -- The frets of luxury -- Golden names -- Native American architecture -- Palaces and hospitals -- Stately lodgings for the poor -- Inhabitants and visitors -- Discipline -- Religious military camps and the Hôtel des Invalides -- Chelsea and the cell -- Publicity and public buildings -- Restoration -- Publication -- Greenwich -- A 'Humour of Colonades' -- Looking at asylums -- False taste and Christian modernity -- Venetian windows -- Lunette windows -- Raising the hospital, each performing his part -- Useful expertise -- The charitable construction of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary -- Protestant benevolence -- The appearances of the eighteenth-century civil hospital -- Courtyard palaces -- Conversions, single files, and square plans -- A college in a hospital -- Letter-plans -- Appraisal -- The breath of life -- Miasmata and other airs -- Ships and Stephen Hales -- Island hospitals -- The early naval hospitals -- The royal hospitals at Haslar and Plymouth -- Remaking the Hôtel-Dieu -- Ornament and the architect -- Ornamental parts -- Complaining and reforming -- Natural architecture -- First principles -- Radical charity -- The dream of air -- The planning of the Derby Infirmary -- 'Architectural rotondities'.

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