The Hospital Bed as an Object and Space. On the Material Culture of Psychiatry in the 19th and 20th Centuries
The hospital bed remains, up until today, a central component in our conceptions of illness and treatment. With the turn of the 20th century introduction of bed treatment the hospital bed became a central element in psychiatric treatment – a “medicine” in the strict sense of the word. Sick persons were treated, often over the course of weeks and months, while lying in bed. The medical sphere of psychiatry, which unfolded its epistemological function, defining structure, and therapeutic effect through the object of the bed, stood directly opposed to the sphere which patients experienced (lying down) and being reduced in their actions to the bed. The goal of the project is, using the example of the hospital bed, which is conceptualized and analyzed as a space and an object, to work out historical perspectives on a material culture of psychiatry.
Monika Ankele studied history in Graz, Vienna, and Berlin and obtained her doctorate with a thesis on self-testimonies of psychiatric patients from the Prinzhorn Collection. Since 2012, she has served as a research fellow at the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, and is currently working on a DFG project that addresses the material culture of psychiatry and focuses on, among other examples, the hospital bed.
