Atouts, complexité et difficultés d’une étude portant sur le patrimoine hospitalier

• Main Author: Pierre-Louis Laget
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication 2017-02-01
• Series: In Situ : Revue de Patrimoines
• Subjects: hospital; hospital architecture; history; inventory of sources; documentary research; architectural theory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/insitu/14084

Any study of the hospital heritage will come up against two major obstacles. The first difficulty is in defining the territorial perimeter of the study, a region with some sort of geographical and political coherence, considering that the architectural issues were transnational one, as early as the eighteenth century. The second obstacle derives from the first in that the corpus to be studied is a national one, at least, and the categories of buildings to be considered were spread out all over the national territory, witnessing extraordinary development from the middle of the nineteenth century. Hospitals, hospices, mental asylums, sanatoriums... there were several thousands of them at the end of the twentieth century. This mere number might appear to be an insurmountable obstacle to a study that aims at being both exhaustive and in-depth. But the researcher nonetheless has a precious tool in the multitude of publications, mainly articles in the press, dealing with this subject and often taking into consideration the questions of architectural design. There is probably no other building type that is so thoroughly addressed by published texts, although of course this is at the same time another drawback since reading all these articles takes time. Nonetheless, the variety of viewpoints expressed in these articles allows the researcher not to go off in search of unpublished archival sources. The disadvantage of these published sources, however, is that they tend to present analyses of the predominant architectural types, marked by the ideology, the tyranny, of progress, at the expense of other designs following other conceptions and consequently unpublished and unknown to us.