by the Hospital Senses Collective
‘From my bed on the balcony, I would entice robins and sparrows to sit on my hand by holding out crumbs of bread.’ Ann Peters (Williams)
– The Bird Tamer [1]
In this quote the balcony of the children’s tuberculosis sanatorium is remembered as a physical space that inhabits the threshold between the interior and exterior, while the sparrows moved between their garden and hedgerow realm and the constructed healthcare setting.
Another patient’s 1945 diary of life in a tuberculosis sanatorium similarly describes how the large open French windows allowed birds to be seen and heard from the ward, creating what she felt was a ‘nice atmosphere.’[2] Wild birds crossed hospital thresholds to co- produce the sensory experience. The architectural features of balconies and placement of the sanatorium in a rural landscape facilitated this sensory encounter, but the birds themselves created the visual and sonic atmosphere.
Birds might be a surprising case study for hospital ‘thresholds’. It is commonly assumed that nature is ‘out there’, while patients are inside. However, birds illustrate the porous nature of some hospitals, particularly in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tuberculosis sanatoria discussed above. Their open air therapies stipulated open doors, windows and balconies, encouraging sensory engagements that bridged the two realms with sound, vision, smell or touch, and even taste in hospitals where food was grown on-site.
Once we note the porousness of sensory encounters, do we then conceive of the relationship between ‘nature outside’ and the experience of the healthcare building inside? From the, perhaps unwelcome, sounds of raucous seagulls on hospital roofs to the physical encounters with birds and other animals, nature is not necessarily welcome or even confined to the exterior but moves across the internal/external threshold in many different ways.
As we keep windows shut and lock doors to courtyards, and increasingly aim to confine nature to the exterior, we might also lose something in the meaning created by the human / non-human therapeutic relationship. Encounters between birds and humans offer a multi-sensory experience created through the unpredictability of the non-human agent.[3] The visitation of wild birds creates the meaning in such encounters.
Therapeutic nature is often thought of as a benign sunny garden or beautiful landscape, photographs and paintings on hospital walls, or the reduction of natural bird song to the playing of a recording of the dawn chorus on a loop. Yet this is an idealised experience, one that flattens the often messy, complicated, and potentially risky multi-sensory presence of nature.
References
- A. Shaw and C. Reeves, The Children of Craig-y-Nos: Life in a Welsh Tuberculosis Sanatorium, 1922-1959 (Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009), p. 123.
- R. Hurt, ‘Tuberculosis sanatorium regimen in the 1940s: A patient’s personal diary’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 97:7 (2004), 350-353.
- S. Bell, ’Nurturing sociality with birdlife in the context of life with sight impairment: a role for nonhuman charisma’, Social & Cultural Geography (2019) DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2019.1667018
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