ABSTRACT
The architects and doctors who met to discuss the rebuilding of St Hans Hospital, and who corresponded about the construction of the Schleswig Asylum, thus shared the same myths: all thought it self-evident, for example, that lunatic asylums should have a few trees planted around them. The Hogarthian vignette of urban life, with its madness, venereal disease, and alcoholism, would be replaced by a picturesque landscape. Denmark’s largest concentration of lunatics was to be found in St Hans Hospital, the old plague hospital to which the insane, then in a former leper hospital, were first moved in 1619. In 1797, eleven years before the farm was purchased, he proposed the hospital’s removal to an estate where the ‘respectable sick of all classes’ could be accommodated in the manor house. Physicians like Peter Willers Jessen began to assume control over the shape of buildings, which had become indistinguishable from the hospitals they housed.
