Review: Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893–1943, by Annmarie Adams

Abstract

Annmarie Adams ; Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893––1943 ; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 240 pp., 90 b/w illus. $27.50, ISBN 9780816651146 Annmarie Adams's Medicine by Design wears its learning lightly. But readers should not be fooled. This is an erudite volume, remarkable for the depth of its research and the thoughtfulness of its argument. Medicine by Design tells the story of a handful of hospitals (and additions to hospitals) in order to refute the oversimplified notion that innovation in medical practice drove architectural change. Adams's starting position is that this was a reciprocal and iterative process wherein architects influenced doctors and vice versa. The full title, Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893––1943 , suggests a much larger topic than the one covered; indeed, Adams's book is far from comprehensive, but, except in the title, she makes no claims to that effect. In fact, the book places one hospital at its center, the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, and one architectural firm, Stevens and Lee, dominates the study. Nonetheless, Adams seems oddly ambivalent toward the man she establishes as the key figure in early twentieth-century hospital architecture, Edward Fletcher Stevens. She takes pains not to give Stevens too much credit, in spite of the fact that he was the author of the hugely influential The American Hospital in the Twentieth Century …