Building Schools, Making Doctors - by Katherine L Carroll (Hardcover)

About the Book

How Medical Colleges Defined and Promoted a Reformed Pedagogy, Modern Science, and the New Physician

Book Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century, medical educators intent on transforming American physicians into scientifically trained, elite professionals recognized the value of medical school design for their reform efforts. Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility. In Building Schools, Making Doctors, Katherine Carroll reveals how the schools constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a remodeled system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting an innovative pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician.

Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, uncovering a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became. Carroll offers the first comprehensive study of the science and pedagogy formulated by the buildings, the influence of the schools' donors and architects, the impact of the structures on the urban landscape and the local community, and the facilities' privileging of white men within the medical profession during this formative period for physicians and medical schools.

Review Quotes

A beautiful book full of photographs, ground plans, and floor plans, Building Schools, Making Doctors is a well-researched scholarly work that would be of interest to medical historians, architectural historians, and anyone interested in medical education, past and present.-- "Nursing History Review"

Carroll's history of the American medical school is an exemplar of how we might understand professional school architecture writ large.-- "Isis"

Carroll's exploration of the medical school shows that typological studies seem to be an evergreen research methodology, able to adapt to shifting academic priorities while remaining true to their comparative essence.-- "Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians"

A fascinating exploration of medical school construction between 1890 and 1940 and how architects, educators, and donors collaborated to promote a new version of scientific medicine and refashion professional identity. Richly researched, Building Schools, Making Doctors is an impressive analysis of the intercalation of pedagogy and design in the grounding of modern medicine.--John Warner, Yale University

Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, [Carroll's] study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, uncovering a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became.-- "New Books Network"

Katherine Carroll's Building Schools, Making Doctors breaks new ground in the architectural history of medicine. Rather than focusing on hospital design, which dominates the field, she tours us through the remarkable spaces where physicians trained, showing us how architecture actively shaped medicine over five transformative decades.--Annmarie Adams, author of Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943

This is the first book to examine deeply the changes in the physical format of the medical schools during this transformative period.-- "Technology and Culture"

About the Author

Katherine L. Carroll is an architectural historian based in Albany, New York. Support for her research has come from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. Carroll has presented widely on medical school design and taught most recently at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.