Main description:

Visiting relatives and friends in medical institutions is a common practice in all corners of the world. People probably go into hospitals as a visitor more frequently than they do as a patient. Permeable Walls is the first book devoted to the history of hospital and asylum visiting and deflects attention from medical history's more traditionally studied constituencies, patients and doctors.

Contents:

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz: Hospital and Asylum Visiting in Historical Perspective: Themes and Issues

Jonathan Reinarz: Receiving the Rich, Rejecting the Poor: Towards a History of Hospital Visiting in Nineteenth-Century Provincial England

Michelle Renshaw: 'Family-Centred Care' in American Hospitals in Late-Qing China

Andrea Tanner: Care, Nurturance and Morality: The Role of Visitors and the Victorian London Children's Hospital

Bruce Lindsay: Pariahs or Partners? Welcome and Unwelcome Visitors in the Jenny Lind Hospital for Sick Children, Norwich, 1900-50

Robin L. Rohrer: Visiting Children with Cancer: The Parental Experience of the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 1995-2005

Graham Mooney: Infection and Citizenship: (Not) Visiting Isolation Hospitals in Mid-Victorian Britain

Kevin Siena: Stage-Managing a Hospital in the Eighteenth Century: Visitation at the London Lock Hospital

Leonard Smith: 'The Keeper Must Himself be Kept': Visitation and the Lunatic Asylum in England, 1750-1850

James H. Mills and Sanjeev Jain: 'A Disgrace to a Civilised Community': Colonial Psychiatry and the Visit of Edward Mapother to South Asia, 1937-8

Janet Miron: 'In View of the Knowledge to be Acquired': Public Visits to New York's Asylums in the Nineteenth Century

Dolly MacKinnon: 'Amusements are Provided': Asylum Entertainment and Recreation in Australia and New Zealand c.1860-c.1945

Catharine Coleborne: Challenging Institutional Hegemony: Family Visitors to Hospitals for the Insane in Australia and New Zealand, 1880s-1910s

Notes on Contributors

Index