The Institute™ - Hamilton was delighted to be able to host a fascinating visit by leading architectural historian, Annmarie Adams, Associate Professor and Dawson Scholar at the School of Architecture, McGill University in Montreal. As with many of The Institute™ 's special events, the Adams lecture drew quite a crowd from both within the residence and from the surrounding area, and the discussion following her lecture continued until well into the evening, and continues still in The Institute™ 's corridors and apartments.

Always mindful of the role of the abandoned hospital in our own history, The Institute™ is very pleased to be able to present in full the famous Verona lecture which was the template for Professor Adams's contribution to our series. (adams_verona_lecture.pdf) PDF Reader Required. Click here if you need the PDF Reader.

We are pleased as well to link our visitors to the work of Professor Adams and her colleagues on the History of Hospitals in general (http://www.cf.ac.uk/hisar/people/kw/montreal_de.html) and their corollary work under the interesting aegis, 'Medicine by Design'. http://ww2.mcgill.ca/arch/mbd/

Here is the introductory quotation from the History of Hospitals site:

The International Network for the History of Hospitals will hold its first international conference in North America at McGill University in Montreal in June 2003. The conference seeks to examine the relationships between the form and function of health care institutions as it has developed over time, place, and institution from the medieval to the modern period in different local and national contexts. How have medical ideas and functions shaped design? How did different patient populations experience the hospital and contribute to its formal development? How is the hospital imagined and portrayed? How has the hospital formed a medical and social space? To explore these issues, "Form + Function" will be divided into four inter-related sessions as is shown in the conference plan.

Below follows a draft outline of the programme for the June conference. If there is a topic or a speaker of special interest, residents and visitors are invited to recommend their participation in our series.

"Form + Function: The Hospital"
3rd conference of the International Network for the History of Hospitals (INHH) McGill University, Montreal Canada 19-21 June 2003

Preliminary Program/Agenda:
Following the successful pattern established in the INHH's two previous conferences (Norwich 1999, Verona 2001), "Form + Function" will be divided into four inter-related sessions.

These sessions will encourage an exploration of a number of questions including: how medical ideas and functions shape design; how different patient populations experience the hospital and contribute to its formal development; how the hospital is imagined and portrayed; and how the hospital forms a medical and social space. Each session will have four 30-minute papers and a discussion led by a distinguished chair who will act as commentator. Paper sessions begin Thursday afternoon and run through Saturday afternoon.

In addition, the McGill School of Architecture will host an exhibition of research posters to coincide with the paper sessions. Guided tours of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine and historic and contemporary hospital sites will be available to conference participants.

Thursday 19 June
9:00-12:00 Arrival and Registration

10:00-12:00 Tours (part I)

13:30 Keynote Speaker
Guenter Risse
"Hospital design and humanism"

15:00-18: Session A:
Social form
Chair: Pat McKeever

Geoffrey Hudson, "Making of the English Military Hospital"
Marta Gutman, "Architecture of care in California"
Noèmi Tousignant, "Pain-full and Pain-free Places: Spaces, Pain and Visibility in Debates about where to Care for the dying in Britain, 1950-1980" Sarah McGann, "Hospice Architecture"

Friday 20 June
9:30-13:00 Session B:
2- and 3-dimensional images
Chair: David Sloane
Cor Wagenaar, "Dutch Hospital Architecture"
Estela Duque, "Architecture and Colonial Medicine"
Anna Schuleit, "Mental health hospitals in Mass, USA"

13:00-15:00 Lunch

15:00-18:00 Session C:
Utopian hospitals: Theory, image, and reality
Chair: Keir Waddington
Peter Scriver, "Contagion and Climate vs. Convention and Control in the Hospital Designs of Colonial India"
JoAnne Brown, "Invisible Cities and the Vernacular of Illness: Architectural responses to TB"
Stacie Burke, "TB architecture in Ontario"
Jayne Elliot, "Nursing Outposts of the Red Cross in Ontario"

19:30 Dinner

Saturday 21 June
9:30-1:00 Session D:
Medical form and functions
Chair: Thomas Schlich

Kevin Siena, "Factory? Hospital? Prison? Workhouse infirmaries in eighteenth century London"
Helen Valier, "Pavilion hospital design"
Matthew Newsom, "Communicating Fevers: The Social World of early-Twentieth Century English Isolation Hospitals"
Gerard J. Fitzgerald, "Constructing the Cradle: Instrumental and Architectural Responses to Airborne infection"

13:00-14:30 Lunch

14:30-17:00 Tours (part II)