Towards a New Hospital: Architecture, Medicine, and Computation, 1960-75

Abstract

This dissertation provides an account of how computing left behind its origins in academic and military research to become part of the hospital's equipmental setting. I examine the efforts of reformers, including administrators, planners, architects, and computer consultants, to provide appropriate accommodation for modern biomedicine. I explore three stories in order to untangle the admixture of architecture, medicine, and computation as they intertwined through a mutual engagement with automation, operations research, cybernetics, and biomedical research in the postwar hospital. In Boston, pioneering research consultants Bolt Beranek and Newman collaborated with the Massachusetts General Hospital on an experimental total information system known as the Hospital Computer Project. In London, architects Llewelyn Davies Weeks used computer algorithms to help design Northwick Park Hospital. And in Canada, the Montreal Neurological Institute adopted computing to transform its expertise in clinical brain imaging research. When possible, I emphasize specific computers, arguing that attention to the presence of the machine itself contributes to our understanding of hospital life.