NCSA 2007 Article Prize winner

Cynthia Imogen Hammond

"Reforming Architecture, Defending Empire: Florence Nightingale and the Pavilion Hospital," Studies in the Social Sciences for July 2005.

The Emerging Scholar Award Competition is in its first year. The Emerging Scholar Award organizing committee met in May and the Award committee's call for submissions went out in June. I would like to thank Maria Bachman and Denis Denisoff for their hard work on the committee this year.

This award recognizes an outstanding article or essay published within five years of the author's doctorate. Entries can be from any discipline focusing on any aspect of the long 19th century (the French Revolution to World War I), must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and must be by a single author. We were very pleased to receive 12 submissions from a variety of disciplines including literature, architectural history, cultural studies and history. We all felt that the quality of the entries was quite good. The Award Committee agreed that our criteria would include the quality of scholarship and writing. We looked at the breadth and clarity of the argument as well as innovation in the interpretation and research. We also considered the interdisciplinary nature of the submissions, especially since this is an important aspect of NCSA's focus.

We unanimously agreed that the Emerging Scholar Award this year should go to Dr. Cynthia Imogen Hammond for her article, "Reforming Architecture, Defending Empire: Florence Nightingale and the Pavilion Hospital," which appeared in a special issue of Volume 38 of Studies in the Social Sciences for July 2005. The special issue was entitled (Un)Healthy Interiors: Contestations at the Intersection of Public Health and Private Space. The serial is published by the University of West Georgia.

Dr. Hammond is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. She wanted you to know that she greatly regrets not being able to attend our conference this year due to prior responsibilities at her university.
We were impressed by the depth and interdisciplinarity of Dr. Hammond's argument that Florence Nightingale's architectural and administrative transformation of the makeshift British barracks hospital at Scutari, Turkey during the Crimean War (1854-1856) led to what would become known as a model of modern nursing, hospital administration and spatial organization. I am quoting here from the article to give you a sense of the breadth and specificity of Hammond's text:

Nightingale continually intervened in the space of the barracks, establishing and reorganizing wards according to function and degree of casualty. . . . Nightingale ordered the construction of rooms, laundry facilities, bathhouses, a reading room for convalescents, special kitchens and organized segregated spaces for the female nurses.

Nightingale extended this reform beyond the medical facilities to the housing and attire of soldiers in the field near the place of battle.
In terms of social history, Hammond points to Nightingale's interest in hospitals, nursing and hospital administration as a larger, significant relationship between upper-class women, architecture and medicine in 19th century British women's history that is only now coming to light in its full extant.

In political theory, she interprets how Nightingale's drive for better surveillance, order and sanitation in a newly organized hospital in the Near East was part of British long-range Imperial ambitions well before the Crimean War started. Hammond makes use of political and cultural theories of Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre to give sophistication to her argument.
Finally, Hammond is the first to persuasively advance the reputation of Florence Nightingale beyond that of a nurse and ideal woman to include her place as an architectural and administrative reformer of military and civilian hospitals.