Arthur Allen
Weyburn Mental Hospital 1920 - 2004, Saskatchewan
The Weyburn asylum in a dust storm echoed the days of crowded hospitals and non-segregated patients in the centuries before the discovery of both sanitation and the bacterial origins of disease. Some hospitals were so filthy and dangerous that they were best described as places to lie down and pray. Tuberculosis, or consumption , was not known to be contagious and was fashionable among poets: infected people were not isolated. Medical understanding of the 17th to 19th centuries held that miasma , foul air from decomposing organic matter, was the cause of disease. Hospital ventilation was of great concern – the pavilion hospital became popular because the separated pavilions had window ventilation on all sides of each building. Breezes removed exhaust air from the lee of buildings and minimised the transfer of air between wards in the pavilions.The Weyburn plan was similar, with cross ventilation of its long wings. In the early 1900s, mechanical ventilating systems began to appear in hospitals and asylums. 2 It was mechanical air delivery that ended the era of pavilion hospitals. The use of ducts in place of windows for ventilation had been debated for some time between the medical and architectural professions. In 1904 British architect A Saxon Snell wrote – Architects have a great moral responsibility – to advise their clients to keep to natural methods rather than artificial. They should be at one with the physician in trying to persuade their clients to have their houses built in such a way that they could live healthily, instead of merely comfortably. 3
The Weyburn hospital was originally planned for 1040 patients; by 1946 it sheltered 2485 sick people; crowding was resolved only after the arrival of psychotropic drugs in the 1950s. Antibiotics temporarily defeated tuberculosis in developed nations in the 1950s and 60s, only to have it reappear as a drug- resistant organism in the 1980s. In November 2010,World Health Organisation statistics stated that a third of the world’s population was infected with tuberculosis, mainly in Africa and South-East Asia. 4 We need to remember that as long as air carries dirt, everyone living in a crowded habitation is at risk. Large asylums were once part of the problem; prisons (once known for ‘gaol fever’) are now breeding grounds for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, syphilis and hepatitis. ° When we confine people in such dangerous places, we add to their burdens and our own. We have surrendered to fear, anger and revenge, imposing slow and terrible punishments without sanction of civilised justice. Buildings and landscapes, without crowding, can do so much for healthy living. We have a choice; why wait for our own name to appear on a list of endangered species? n
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1 Robillard,Anne, editor. Under the Dome.The Life and Times of the Saskatchewan Hospital,Weyburn. Weyburn: Souris Valley History Committee, 1986. p31 2 Markus,Thomas A. Buildings and Power. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. p114 3 Taylor, Jeremy. The Architect and the Pavilion Hospital. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1997. p205 4 World Health Organisation, Fact Sheet 104 , November 2010
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