Nightingale’s Hospital Plans in 3D: Notes on Hospitals, 1863 (Interactive Module)
Nightingale’s Hospital Plans in 3D
In Notes on Hospitals (1863) Florence Nightingale argued for a new kind of hospital with eleven engraved plans. This module rebuilds every one of them in three dimensions, so the argument can be seen as well as read.
Turn it, cut it open, check it against the plate
Choose a plan in the menu, then follow the numbered stops. Each stop moves the camera and gives Nightingale’s own reasoning.
Four things you can do with each model
Choose a plan
Eleven plans in the order of the book, from the two she condemns to the nine she recommends.
Follow the stops
Each numbered stop moves the camera to one feature and explains why it mattered to her.
Cut the model
Lift the roof or a floor to see the ward: beds, windows, fireplaces, and how the air moves.
Check the plate
The original engraving lies under every building. Look straight down to compare the two.
The eleven plans
Defects in existing plans
- IHôtel Dieu, Paris, before the fire of 1772. Above 550 beds on one floor in a single connected suite of wards.Open model
- IIRoyal Victoria Hospital, Netley. The corridor plan: small wards, windows on one side, every door on one passage.Open model
Improved hospital plans
- IIIBucks Infirmary. A small double pavilion for 53 beds, offices below and wards above.Open model
- IVHôpital Lariboisière, Paris. 612 beds in six pavilions round a court. An excellent block plan, built a floor too high.Open model
- VVincennes Military Hospital. 637 beds in double pavilions on two sides of a square with open corners.Open model
- VIThe Herbert Hospital, Woolwich. 650 beds in seven pavilions on one corridor. Her model hospital.Open model
- VIIGeneral Military Hospital, Valetta. Six pavilions side by side on a cramped site, joined by open arcades.Open model
- VIIIAsylum for the Aged and Infirm, Malta. Eight detached pavilions in two squares for 1,000 people.Open model
- IXHospital for Incurables, Malta. Two long pavilions with their own dining halls and day-rooms.Open model
Convalescent and children’s hospitals
From one shared atmosphere to the pavilion
Wards that open into each other, or onto one corridor, share their air. At Netley every ward door is joined by a passage, so the air of each ward reaches all the others.
Small wards put the beds along dead walls, away from the windows, and out of the nurse’s sight.
Separate pavilions that touch the rest of the hospital at one end only, with windows down both long sides of every ward.
Two floors of wards and no more, pavilions set apart by twice their height, and everything the sick do not need moved out of the ward block.
“By far the finest hospital establishment in the united kingdom, or indeed in Europe.”On the Herbert Hospital. Notes on Hospitals, 1863, p. 102
What is drawn, what is stated, what is inferred
Footprints and positions
Every block is traced from the engraving and scaled with the plate’s own scale of feet where it has one.
Storeys, wards and beds
Number of floors, ward dimensions, beds per ward, windows and fireplaces follow what Nightingale wrote.
Roofs, heights and colours
Nine of the eleven plates are ground plans only. Roof forms, storey heights and materials are reconstructions.
The assumptions for each plan are listed inside the model under “Sources and assumptions”. Five plates carry no scale; their scale is estimated from the drawn beds or the stated dimensions.
Source: Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals, 3rd edition, London: Longman, Green, 1863. Plates from the Cornell University Library copy digitized by the Internet Archive.
Prepared by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Nurullah Kurutkan, Düzce University, Faculty of Business, Department of Health Management.
Read the companion article