by the Hospital Senses Collective
When we think of the bed we think of intimacy, comfort, privacy, rest, sleep. Beds may be a sanctuary. Anthropologically, beds are found in all communities: archaeologist Nadia Durrani shows that the earliest beds, 200,000 years ago in cave sites in south Africa, were dug into the ground of caves, and filled with leaves and straw. These were sites of not just sleep but places for preparing meals and eating, for making tools and having conversation. The bed as a complex space can be seen across history and numerous cultures were known to rule from the bed from Henry VIII to Winston Churchill. Most famously, Louis XIV, in the seventeenth-century French Court, ruled from the bed, with his levée (getting up) ritual taking several hours and numerous courtiers, leading smoothly into major political decisions.
But what about the hospital bed? The hospital bed seems in complete opposition to our bed at home. Early hospital beds were no more than pallets for the infirm and destitute to rest upon, overseen by the nuns of the historical hospice. The bed of the eighteenth-century maternity hospital, such as Paris’ famous Hotel Dieu, was a wooden affair in wards accommodating thousands, with a straw mattress for soaking up effluence, sometimes shared by more than one woman at a time. Something like the hospital bed we now recognise, a steel framed space with side rails, was invented in the early nineteenth century, with its development of wheels and segments following over the century.
The modern bed was first developed in 1945, with the famous King’s Fund bed a fundamental redesign in 1967 following research on understandings of efficiency for nursing staff. The hospital bed, with its segmented mattress, tilted at all sorts of angles, with its sidebar to enclose, its stiff thick sheets stretched tautly over a firm yet washable mattress cover (sheets smelling strongly of particular stringent detergents used by hospital laundries) its strange height off the ground, is familiar to many of us as both patients and visitors.
This bed, shared by many over its single history, is functional, clinical, impersonal and, for many, frightening. In contrast to our bed at home, it is a place for waiting, for recovery, resting, recuperation, or for dying. Today, of course, ‘the bed’ is also a descriptor of the hospital’s functionality, or often its lack thereof. ‘The number of beds’ means the capacity of a hospital at any given time. ‘We haven’t got a bed for you’ means there is not ward space for a patient, in which case a bed ‘trolley’ might host a patient in the corridor.
The hospital bed may be draped with tubes and medical equipment; the tray table slides over awkwardly for our meals. With the adjoining trolley side table, the chair and the curtained rail pulled around it, it is the only potential private space in the busy, noisy hospital ward. Although a patient might be moved several times, from bed to bed, they try to make each their own for the brief time of occupancy, collecting in its folds of sheet the talismans, whether books, iPad or objects of familiarity, taken into hospital.
References / Further Reading
- N. Durrani, What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History (Yale University Press, 2019)
- Ghislaine Lawrence, ‘Hospital beds by design: a socio- historical account of the King’s Fund Bed: 1960-1975’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, 2003) https://archive.org/details/HospitalBedsByDesignASocio-historicalAccountOfThekingsFund/ GlBibliog [accessed 15 February 2021]