War and hospitals: Why their architecture has changed during the last three centuries

Abstract

The article presents the relationships between the architecture of military hospitals and the changes that have taken place in the organization of hostilities, the attitude towards the army and the soldier, as well as the development of medical technologies. The case of military hospitals highlights the way architecture reflects many insights about the importance and value of each functional element in architectural design and facade solutions. Several of the crucial factors determining the change in the architecture of military hospitals were the shift in the ideology of war and the role of the soldier, the transformation of dominant views concerning medicine and hygiene, and the development of military equipment and weapons. A military hospital has several characteristics specific to this type, which include the closure of the system, the uneven nature of the incoming flow of casualties, and the specific community which makes a military hospital a machine for returning combatants to service. Through the changes in the architecture of military hospitals, it is possible to see the development of medicine, the change in the role of the soldier, the doctor, the division into the classes of "soldiers" and "officers, " military and civil, the attitude to discipline and the organization of treatment, and the development of military technologies. The timeline of the study covers a period of 313 years, during which the architecture of the hospitals has undergone five major changes corresponding to five temporal stages explicated by this paper. Materials for the study include field diaries and notes, historical references, archival materials, books and articles on Russian history, military history and medicine, as well as interviews with military doctors, historians, and gunsmiths. © 2020 National Research University Higher School of Economics.