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HOSPITALS AND THE PATIENT EXPERIENCE
architecture, art, music and treatment

@ WELLCOME TRUST CENTRE FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE, UCL

on: 16 FEBRUARY 2007

Recent research into the social history of medicine has turned attention from the familiar providers of medical care (physicians, surgeons, nurses, institutional administrators) to the recipients, the patients themselves. Numerous new studies of patient experiences are currently underway. Responding to a wider trend to write history ‘from below’, scholars initially focused upon the role of the sick individual within the ‘medical marketplace’, in an effort to understand patients’ experiences of health and sickness.


Only within the last few years has this new approach begun to be applied to the history of the hospital so as to incorporate new types of written and visual evidence and explore a much wider range of patient experiences than that embraced by earlier studies. This conference will bring together for the first time this new historiography into an integrated exploration of the hospital as a healing environment in which therapy may come from a variety of sources, material as well as personal, natural as well as man-made.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

09.00 Registration
09.20 Welcome
 

Session One: The Physical Environment
Chair: Louise Gray (UCL)

09.30 Clare Hickman (Bristol): “The Grounds Have a Soothing Effect”: The Patient Experience of English Psychiatric Hospital Landscapes from 1800 – 1980
10.00 Nicky Imrie (Birkbeck, London): Patient Experience of Space and Building Types at Two Austro-Hungarian Sanatoria for Nervous Ailments, 1900 - 1914
10.30 Discussion
10.45 Coffee
  Session Two: Art, Material Culture & Healing
Chair: Carole Rawcliffe (UEA)
11.15 Antonia Whitley: The Sufferer's View: Treatment at Santa Maria della Scala, Siena
11.45 Gisela Drossbach (Munich): The Roman Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia: Images and Text in the 'Liber Regulae’ (14th Century)
12.15 Discussion
12.30 Lunch
  Session Three: Music and Ritual
Chair: John Henderson (Birkbeck, London)
14.00 Chris Bonfield (UEA): The Sound of Health: Music as Medicine in the Medieval English Hospital, c. 1348 – 1550
14.30 Carmen Mangion (Birkbeck, London): The Hospital as a Sacred Space: Architecture and Art for the Body and Soul
15.00 Discussion
15.15 Coffee
  Session Four:The Experience of Treatment: Medicines and Apothecaries
Chair: Steve Cherry (UEA)
15.45 pm Vicky Long (Warwick): Laughter is the Best Medicine? Subverting the Therapeutic Regime at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in the Late Nineteenth Century
16.15 Colin Gale (Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives & Museum): “As if to drive me mad”: An Edwardian patient's experience of sedatives and the asylum environment
16.45 Discussion
17.00 Summary: Peregrine Horden (RHUL)
17.30 Close


 

Form + Function: The Hospital
Montreal June 2003

The conference explored the relationship between form and function in health care institutions as it has developed in theory as well as in medical, physical and social structures in the modern period in different local and national contexts.  Follow the link for further details

 

Hospitals and Health: Verona, April 2001

Following the highly successful inaugural conference in Norwich, the Network held its second international conference in Verona, Italy between 19 and 21 April 2001.  In 'Hospitals and Health: The Balance Sheet' the Network sought to produce a cost benefit analysis of a millennium of hospital history in Europe and America.  Costs and benefits were taken in their broadest sense to include not just money, medicine and health but also various causes and consequences of hospital evolution.  Once again the Network consciously adopted an inter-disciplinary approach in order to place the hospital firmly within the context of both the immediate community it served and a much wider world.  The conference was divided into four main sections: finance and patronage, urban and rural topography, the patient's experience,  and economic and demographic impact.

Click here for the conference report by Dr Elaine Phillips


 

From Liturgy to Therapy: Norwich, Nov 1999

 

Other Related Conferences

 

MedHist Callender of Events The calendar of events provides information about lectures, seminars, conferences and other events relating to the history of medicine. The calendar can either be browsed using the following links or searched using the box below

UK history of nursing research colloquium, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, London (11 March 2005). Participants are selected on an invitation-only basis and include the leading researchers in the field, practitioners, nurse educators, and an interdisciplinary mixture of postgraduates at various stages of nursing history research. The day is run as a series of 'masterclass' presentations or workshops with a number of 'experts' in the fields providing a constructive critique on each presentation. Major themes will include: self-image and professional identity; race and gender; the impact of technology; and the importance of political and economic factors in practitioner/patient relationships. Further details can be found at: http://www.wuhmo.ox.ac.uk/events/hnrcolloq.htm

 

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