Throughout the waning decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, medical spaces of various kinds were under fierce negotiation and evolution. As emerging medical fields busily constructed new patient populations and charted out novel therapeutic regimes, purpose-built spaces such as hospital wards, asylums for the mentally ill, specialized clinics, and medical schools functioned as essential sites for the growth of medical knowledge, the enactment of social practice, the expansion of governmental surveillance, and helped forge new identities for clinicians and patients alike.

Many Historians of Medicine are very familiar with the important changes that attended medical practice in the United States over the course of the long nineteenth century: the creation of new medical specialties as scientific knowledge expanded and crystalized; the ways that medical practitioners sought standardization and fought for legitimacy for their profession; how new disease categories functioned in dialectical tension with patient identities; and how, over time, society reevaluated the relationship between normalcy and health, pathology and disease. Many of these foundational historical medical dramas, however, took place within very specific, intentionally curated spaces. We are particularly animated by how, exactly, space operates as a driving force in the history of medicine. Medicalized spaces, we argue, do not merely function as backdrops.

Further, our research demonstrates that medicalized space traversed the public and private spheres. Institutional space took various forms, as practitioners worked to improve patient care—and yet we know that how medical spaces came to function, is far from a simple, progressive historical tale. For example, as psychiatric medicine evolved, new asylums were often designed to surveil the most intimate details of patients’ lives, and enabled invasive bodily interference upon the patients within. Early female hospital collectives forged important inroads for other female medical professionals, as they founded clinics and hospitals from the limited spaces available to them in the newly colonized American West. The specialized site of the clinic enabled the creation of novel, gendered disease categories, while sites of medical education were deeply entangled with histories of enslavement. By bringing together this collection of site-specific studies, our panel hopes to illuminate medicalized space as a problem space— one that is deserving of close and sustained analysis.