As with so many aspects of our lives, healthcare changed radically as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment thinking which it triggered. Some changes were of immense value, but others came with unfortunate consequences. ASCHB2024 turned the microscope onto the built environment and healthcare, looking at the impacts of science and fashion on hospitals and other healthcare buildings, and asking: what are we doing right, and where have we gone off the rails? How can we extract the best ideas from the whole history of healthcare in the built environment, to construct a better and healthier future?
SESSION 1: KNOWLEDGE FROM THE PAST - PART 1
Jelena Bekvalac, Curator of Human Osteology at the Museum of London
What we really know about health in the past: “Cancer, diabetes, dementia.. We think of these diseases as scourges of modern industrial living, but have they always existed undetected in humans? Do we have genetic predispositions to such conditions? The archive of human skeletal remains at the Museum of London provides a large bank of evidence to investigate how far some of these diseases go back in time.”
Dr Michael Carter, Senior Properties Historian at English Heritage
Medieval Monasteries and public health: “How different things were in earlier centuries when life, according to the old adage, was “nasty, brutish and short”. But despite what Blackadder, Monty Python and countless HistoryChannel documentaries would have you believe, our medieval ancestors weren’t stupid. Nor were they entirely helpless in the face of illness and disease. As was so often the case, monasteries were at the forefront, providing both physical and spiritual healing.”
India Wright, University of Cambridge doctoral candidate and Trustee of the Construction History Society
Spas and health: “We know much about the major spas at Bath and Tunbridge Wells which catered for the wealthy elite, but what of the lesser spas which sprang up in the late seventeenth century to be frequented by ordinary people?… [what do their structures] divulge of the health and social rituals of the time?”
