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. By focusing on the history of hospital gardens in England, Hickman adds a new dimension to current concerns regarding the therapeutic environment. She 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? Hickman uses garden history methodologies to trace 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 Victorian pavilion hospital design with courtyard gardens, and the open-air institutions of the Edwardian period with their revolving chalets. She concludes with a discussion of twenty-first century hospital gardens being created by designers such as Dan Pearson, and assesses the current interest in such spaces. Therapeutic landscapes follows the changes in ideas, designs and medical beliefs over the last two centuries and relates these to wider concerns about the growth of civilization, urbanisation and our relationship with the natural world. 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, and it will also appeal to those currently working in the field of therapeutic garden design and medical policy.