ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns art in health buildings, which, like art in transport, has become a specialism within the field of public art; whilst universal health care and public transport are social ‘goods’ (though health care tends to be a more volatile issue, and in both fields arguments are advanced that artists and crafts-people should be involved in the design as well as decoration of facilities), there is an obvious difference in that people use hospitals only from necessity, and often in fear of illness and its consequences. Perhaps there is also a difference in that scientific medicine implies that its effects can be measured, suggesting that the contribution of art to healing might, too, be systematically evaluated. At the same time, the hospital is a recent institution with its own socially produced, influential and contestable culture; as the hospital has increasingly contained and organised, or medicalised, the events of birth, illness and death, its culture has been questioned through new approaches to care and a new interest in mind-body medicine.1 In the UK, reorganisation of the National Health Service (NHS) and realisation that large hospitals are less efficient as well as more daunting than local provision in human-scale environments, has meant that some aspects of health care are returning to community settings.
