Therapeutic landscapes (A history of English hospital gardens since 1800)

Therapeutic landscapes uniquely brings together historical and contemporary debates on the use of the garden as a therapeutic space. Hickman narrates the story of the landscapes associated with psychiatric, general and specialist medical institutions and asks what did they look like, how were they used and how did this relate to medical concepts? It traces the history of these gardens from the grottos, Chinese galleries and summer houses of elite nineteenth-century lunatic asylums, through Florence Nightingale’s championing of the Victorian pavilion hospital design with its courtyard gardens, and the open-air institutions of the Edwardian period with their revolving chalets. It concludes with a discussion of new hospital gardens being created by designers such as Dan Pearson in the twenty-first century.

This book will be essential reading for those interested in the histories of place, space and material culture, and in particular medical historians, garden historians and historical geographers.