Review: Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940

Book Review| September 01 2021 Review: Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940 Jeanne Kisacky Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 456 pp., 177 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780822944614 David Theodore David Theodore McGill University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2021) 80 (3): 353–355. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2021.80.3.353 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation David Theodore; Review: Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2021; 80 (3): 353–355. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2021.80.3.353 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search Scholars tell two stories about the history of modern hospital architecture. The first of these, indebted to Michel Foucault, puts the emergence of the building type at the end of the eighteenth century in France. In this story, the hospital evolved in response to the same external factors that shaped the emergence of schools, barracks, and prisons. Although the hospital promoted new medical practices, patterns of governance drove its architecture, not medical activities. In contrast, the second story focuses on the rapid transformation of the hospital's mission from “care to cure” at the end of the nineteenth century, with the advent of trained nurses, aseptic surgery, bacteriology, new technologies such as X-ray imaging, and modern business accounting methods. According to this narrative, it was the ascendancy of medical practice as a central institution of the modern social order that changed hospital architecture. In Rise of the Modern Hospital, Jeanne... You do not currently have access to this content.