Designing Doctors

Dr. Annmarie Adams will give a talk on her exhibit Designing Doctors, which highlights the contributions of physicians to hospital architecture.  

Designing Doctors showcases the Osler Library’s outstanding collection of architectural advice literature on hospital architecture.   Its focus is on the development of the so-called pavilion-plan hospital, a ubiquitous typology for hospitals in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which maximized ventilation and daylight; their signature detail, however, was the Nightingale ward, a large, open space which typically housed about thirty patients.

Dr. Annmarie Adams is Director and William C. Macdonald Professor at the School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal. She is the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 (McGill-Queens University Press, 1996), Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and co-author of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (University of Toronto Press, 2000).  More information about this exhibit is on our blog.