Atlas de la Révolution française, 7: Médecine et santé

forms one chapter of Building types (1976), lamented the lack of studies in this field. "There are", he wrote, "few 'types' as fruitful as the Hospital, if one wants to see how functional thought, i.e. medical convictions and discoveries, is reflected in plans and elevations; the pavilion type instead of the cruciform plan and the big blocks of today owing to antisepsis." Dr Taylor is one of the few historians to have taken the hint. The nineteenth century was a most fruitful time for the development of the hospital as therapeutic instrument, rather than simply a-by turns more or less architecturally distinguished-container for outcasts from society. There was, towards the end of the century, much development of elegant variations on the pavilion plan form. This tendency led to a fashion for circular wards from the 1 880s and, around 1900, the "X" plan. The latter is perhaps best exemplified at University College Hospital, London, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and his son Paul. Such was the volume of theory behind these experimental hospital buildings that a writer in The Builder, a trade weekly, remarked in 191 1, "The operating theatre is more a surgical instrument than a building." Almost incidentially, the skirmishes of scholarship and fashion that characterize the nineteenth-century "Battle of the Styles" are considered when appropriate. The book has a gazetteer, arranged by architect and by location, which leads the reader to references and illustrations. Some temporarily forgotten specialist hospital architects are accorded potted biographies. The energetic user of Dr Taylor's gazetteer will quickly come to realize that urban and suburban hospitals "fitted in" with the style of their localities. Northwood, a pleasantly stodgy late-nineteenth-century dormitory suburb is host to the tuberculosis annexe to Mount Vernon Hospital. The Hospital, in particular the "Arts and Crafts" style chapel, is an exercise in discretion. This book is an indispensable addition to the slender corpus on hospital design, which invites further study of the twentieth century, thus far only touched on by architectural historians, notably Adrian Forty in 'The modern hospital in England and France: the social and medical uses of architecture' in A. King's Buildings and society (1980). This last book is a surprising omission from Dr Taylor's bibliography, which seems somewhat truncated. Why mention only two of the special hospital numbers of the Architect's Journal, when several were published? If there is fault to find, it is not with the …