Permeable walls : historical perspectives on hospital and asylum visiting / / edited by Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz.

• Superior document: Clio medica, 86
• TeilnehmendeR: Mooney, Graham.; Reinarz, Jonathan.
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands) ; 86.; Wellcome series in the history of medicine.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (369 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.
• Other title: Preliminary material /; List of Figures /; List of Tables /; Acknowledgements /; Hospital and Asylum Visiting in Historical Perspective: Themes and Issues /; Receiving the Rich, Rejecting the Poor: Towards a History of Hospital Visiting in Nineteenth-Century Provincial England /; ‘Family-Centred Care’ in American Hospitals in Late-Qing China /; Care, Nurturance and Morality: The Role of Visitors and the Victorian London Children’s Hospital /; Pariahs or Partners? Welcome and Unwelcome Visitors in the Jenny Lind Hospital for Sick Children, Norwich, 1900–50 /; Visiting Children with Cancer: The Parental Experience of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, 1995–2005 /; Infection and Citizenship: (Not) Visiting Isolation Hospitals in Mid-Victorian Britain /; Stage-Managing a Hospital in the Eighteenth Century: Visitation at the London Lock Hospital /; ‘The Keeper Must Himself be Kept’: Visitation and the Lunatic Asylum in England, 1750–1850 /; ‘A Disgrace to a Civilised Community’: Colonial Psychiatry and the Visit of Edward Mapother to South Asia, 1937–8 /; ‘In View of the Knowledge to be Acquired’: Public Visits to New York’s Asylums in the Nineteenth Century /; ‘Amusements are Provided’: Asylum Entertainment and Recreation in Australia and New Zealand c.1860–c.1945 /; Challenging Institutional Hegemony: Family Visitors to Hospitals for the Insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1880's–1910's /; Notes on Contributors /; Index /
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• ISBN: 1282505181; 9786612505188; 9042026324
• ISSN: 0045-7183
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: edited by Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz.

Visiting relatives and friends in medical institutions is a common practice in all corners of the world. People probably go into hospitals as a visitor more frequently than they do as a patient. Permeable Walls is the first book devoted to the history of hospital and asylum visiting and deflects attention from medical history’s more traditionally studied constituencies, patients and doctors. Covering the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and taking case studies from around the globe, the authors demonstrate that hospitals and asylums could be remarkably permeable institutions. However, policies towards visitors have varied from outright exclusion, as in the case of some isolation hospitals in Victorian Britain, to near open access in the first Chinese missionary hospitals. Historical studies of visitors and visiting, as a result, tell us much about the changing relationship between healthcare institutions and the communities they serve. These histories are particularly relevant at a time when service providers seek ways to involve patients’ representatives in healthcare decision making; to control hospital super-bugs; and to make the hospital environment accessible yet safe and secure. With the re-emergence of restricted visiting, the subject remains one of the most emotive topics in the history of institutional medicine. Adopting a wide-ranging definition of visitors, from official inquirers to family members, Permeable Walls provides an innovative perspective on hospitals and asylums historically and will interest historians of medicine, charity and governance, as well as healthcare policy-makers.