Places of illness, spaces for healing: the built environment of healthcare in Anatolia through the ages

Abstract

Places of Illness, Spaces for Healing: The Built Environment of Healthcare in Anatolia Through the Ages explores the intersections of spatiality, healing, illness, and healthcare architecture in Anatolia and its surrounding geographies from Antiquity to modern times. The volume addresses several themes and issues in critical medical and health humanities including the relationship between nature and health, therapeutic landscapes, sensory, ritualistic, and performative dynamics of healing environments, and the role of water in healthcare architecture, spaces, and places of healing. The 16 authors who have contributed chapters to this volume come from diverse disciplines and scholarly traditions and use a great variety of evidence in their research, ranging from material remains and hospital building plans to written documents, oral histories, and the imagined spaces of novels. Welcoming this highly inclusive approach to sources and methodologies, this volume demonstrates that healing and illness happen(ed) both within and outside hospital walls and in many places and spaces, such as the home, baths, gardens, and sites of ritual and religious practices. While contributing to the development of medical and health humanities in Türkiye and beyond, Places of Illness, Spaces for Healing: The Built Environment of Healthcare in Anatolia Through the Ages expands our current understanding and definitions of healthcare architecture and places and spaces of healing and illness in an important region of the world.