Architectural Types for Healing and Control. The Interplay of Architecture, Material Culture, and Therapeutic Practice

International Congress - XIII ABRILS DE L’HOSPITAL (Lisbon’2024) HOSPITAL MATERIAL CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AND EARLY MODERN AGES. CONCEPTS AND MEANINGS President of the Sicentific and Organizer Commitee: Dra. Joana Balsa de Pinho Scientific Commitee: Dr. Antoni Conejo, Dra. Blanca Garí, Dr. Raúl Villagrasa, Dra. Ana Rita Rocha, Dra. Cybelle Miranda SESSION III. Healing and Medicine This conference paper explores the spatial and material dimensions of healing in early modern hospitals, focusing on how architectural forms and everyday objects shaped the experience of illness and care. Far from being neutral containers, hospital spaces actively participated in therapeutic regimes—through their organization, visibility, and the material culture they embedded. Beds, partitions, windows, and even the alignment of wards were not only functional elements but also carriers of meaning, reflecting broader medical, religious, and social values. By examining architectural plans, inventories, and visual representations from hospitals across medieval and early modern Europe, the paper investigates how space and materiality were mobilized to structure healing environments. It highlights the role of objects and spatial arrangements in mediating relationships between patients, caregivers, and institutional authority, revealing how healing was not only a physiological process but also a spatially and culturally embedded practice. Bringing together approaches from architectural history and medical anthropology, the paper contributes to the understanding of hospital material culture as an active agent in the production of health, order, and identity. It emphasizes that the experience of healing was inseparable from the spatial and material frameworks in which it occurred—frameworks that encoded both practical and symbolic meanings.