"So delightful a temporary home": The Material Culture of Domesticity in Late Nineteenth-century English Convalescent Institutions.

This article examines the material culture of domesticity in late nineteenth-century English convalescent institutions. Convalescent homes drew on powerful Victorian ideas about the physical and moral benefits of "home-like" domestic comfort, which they contrasted with the "institutional" environment of hospitals and the degrading surroundings of urban slums. Administrative records, press accounts, photographs, and patient letters reveal how convalescent homes cultivated temporary home-like environments through architecture, interior decoration, and behavioral expectations and routines. Convalescent homes drew on heterogeneous models of domesticity, including the grand architecture of country estates, the possession-packed spaces of middle-class homes, and the recreational spaces of male social clubs. Nevertheless, they shared a belief in the power of domestic spaces, comforts, and practices to support the recovery of convalescents and to influence their identity and behavior. The material culture and practices of domesticity deployed in convalescent homes encouraged reflection, self-improvement, and self-control-qualities essential to the cultivation of respectable, self-governing, liberal citizens. Nevertheless, the meanings and experiences of these spaces were also shaped by inmates, whose expectations and experiences did not always align with the ideal image of home that authorities wished to create.

Cliveden: The Canadian Red Cross Hospital, William Osler and the 'Taplow Affair'.

At the start of the First World War, the estate of Cliveden was offered as a hospital to the Canadian Government by its owner William Astor. This article describes its history, Sir William Osler's involvement in the hospital, and the involvement of other doctors and some of their research. The rehabilitation programs to help the injured soldiers are described, including the physical, occupational, sporting and social activities undertaken in order to help them towards their return to civilian life. Political ambitions in Canada and friction between the owner of Cliveden, Nancy Astor, and the medical/military establishment led to turmoil which engulfed Osler and is known as the 'Taplow Affair'. The hospital was dismantled after the war but became re-activated in the Second World War and is now a National Trust property.

University of Alberta Hospital Acute and Convalescent Polio Care and the Reintegration of Polio Patients into Albertan Communities, 1953-80.

Following Canada's largest polio epidemic in 1953, Station 67 at the University of Alberta Hospital (UAH) in Edmonton became home to patients who contracted the virus. As young as nine years old, some of these patients lived at the UAH for more than three decades. Akin to wartime services, the epidemic banded together families, patients, doctors, nurses, community members, and later respiratory, physical, and occupational therapists. The nature of the disease, the government response, and the social and economic climate dramatically affected the lived experiences of patients in Alberta's fight against polio. Drawing on archival research and oral interviews, this article argues that it was the agency and resilience of patients, the contributions of healthcare providers to rapid developments in acute and convalescent care, and the dedication of families that were primarily responsible for the recovery and reintegration of polio patients back into the community.

The Colour Treatment: A Convergence of Art and Medicine at the Red Cross Russell Lea Nerve Home.

When the Red Cross opened its new convalescent home at Russell Lea in Sydney in 1919, it contained a coloured room designed for treating 'nerve cases'. This room was painted by Roy de Maistre, a young artist, and was modelled on the Kemp Prossor colour scheme trialled at the McCaul Convalescent Hospital in London for the treatment of shell shock. Dubbed the 'colour cure' by the popular press, this unconventional treatment was ignored by the Australian medical profession. The story of de Maistre's colour experiment is not widely known outside the specialist field of Australian art history. Focusing on the colour room as a point of convergence between art and medicine in the context of the First World War, this article investigates Red Cross activities and the care of soldiers suffering from nervous conditions.

Hospitals for the excluded or convalescent homes?: workhouses, medicalization and the poor law in long eighteenth-century London and Pre-Confederation Toronto.

Workhouses proliferated throughout England and the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their role in increasingly institutionalized welfare systems has been well studied. Less attention has come to focus on their considerable medical services. Large infirmaries within English workhouses can be found by the early eighteenth century, providing crucial medical care to the very poor. However, levels of workhouse medicalization varied greatly throughout the Atlantic world. This article compares the medical services of workhouses in London with the one established in Pre-Confederation Toronto to assess how and why their medical histories diverge so greatly.

Reminiscences of poliomyelitis past.

The article by Markel in the new Historical Perspectives of Pediatrics section of the ARCHIVES brings back a flood of memories, as I belong to the generation of pediatricians who actually used tank respirators in treating patients with poliomyelitis. In 1949, the city of Baltimore, Md, closed its contagious disease hospital (Sydenham), which served all of Maryland, and transferred its function to the Baltimore City Hospitals. The reasoning, in addition to a very low occupancy rate at Sydenham, was that the only contagious disease then likely ever to occur in epidemic form was poliomyelitis.