Knowledge and power: perspectives in the history of psychiatry. Selected papers from the Third Triennial Conference of the European Association for the History of Psychiatry

politicians, poets, and medical reformers, the author has given us a rich and nuanced account of a medicalizing world in which the redefinition of the hospital as a healing space remained at best ambiguous. The work is divided into ten chapters. At the outset, Stevenson engages in a discussion of the traditional outer splendour and ostentation displayed by hospital buildings as houses of God. While such luxury had been an important measure of hospitality and charitable commitment for earlier donors and patrons, it seemed increasingly at odds with a new medical agenda that sought to envision institutions as places for brief stints of rehabilitation. A clash of religious values posited a Catholic propensity to blind and dominate their flocks with extravagant monuments against a mythical, spartan Protestant bent for individual freedom and voluntary collaboration. The ensuing tension created between the vanity of founders and the professional needs of medical men came to shape British hospital design. Subsequent chapters offer a comparative view between palaces and hospitals, the control of spaces within them and need for discipline, especially in asylums. The gradual process of planning and raising funds for a voluntary hospital is chronicled in great detail for the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Here Stevenson illuminates the collective effort to erect such an institution, pointing out the convergence of public good with private profit within the context of a perceived spirit of Protestant benevolence that even enlisted the builders and suppliers to contribute their labour and materials to this charitable quest. Not to be ignored were the wishes of hospital subscribers who expected the rapid recovery of their sick workforce and the commercial expansion of the former capital of Scotland through an influx of medical students from England and the colonies who would walk its wards. The remaining chapters deal with the growing problem of institutional cross-infection that converted hospitals into "gateways to death". Stagnant and hot air, corrupted by the febrile exhalations of the sick, seemed the culprit, prompting numerous design changes, including the elimination of quadrangles, the expansion of windows to facilitate ventilation, and the break up of large wards to segregate potentially contagious individuals. Cubic air space and flow became important criteria to avoid sick buildings. Here Stevenson points out how innovations in the construction of textile mills during the early Industrial Revolution-including fireproofing, roof ventilation, paved floors, plastered beams and cast iron columns-were adopted by the builders …