![]() The recognition by Nightingale and her contemporaries that healthy, well-ventilated environments could help prevent airborne diseases contributed to physicians’ and campaigners’ concerns about the lack of open spaces in crowded cities. ![]() While hospitals have moved away from the “pavilion” model, we can still see traces of her impact in modern hospitals, where natural ventilation is recommended to prevent airborne infections. Although Nightingale wasn’t the first or last person to champion the benefits of fresh air, her ideas had a lasting impact on hospital design. “Unless the air within the ward can be kept as fresh as it is without, the patients had better be away”, she wrote. Nightingale’s solution was to remove contaminated air from hospitals and replace it with clean air. Physicians and scientists were divided over the emerging field of “bacteriology” pioneered by Louis Pasteur, but there were no effective treatments or cures for these diseases, and their causes weren’t fully understood. They separated patients from one another, reducing crowding and helping clean air to circulate.Īt the time, contagious diseases were the greatest cause of death, and patients who had otherwise been recovering well in hospital would have contracted untreatable infections. These were barracks-like quarters, detached on three sides like wings from a central corridor building, with windows at equal intervals. For her, the ideal ward style was a “pavilion” (later renamed “Nightingale wards”). In her 1859 book, Notes on Hospitals, Nightingale laid out what she thought made a healthy hospital building, paying particular attention to sanitation, ventilation and air flow. One of these people was Florence Nightingale, aka the Lady with the Lamp, best known for her nursing work during the Crimean war. In these unsanitary, often temporary buildings, high death rates were common, prompting people to think about the role of hospital design. ![]() As growing numbers of people moved into cities, more hospitals were built to house the sick. In the 19th century, Britain suffered regular epidemics of diseases such as cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid and smallpox. ![]()
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