PHASE 1. 2019-2020 – HEALING ROMANIAN PATRIMONY: HOSPITALS, HEALTH AND HERITAGE
PHASE 2. 2020-2021 – HEALING EUROPEAN CULTURAL HERITAGE: HOSPITALS, HEALTH AND HERITAGE
Research developed and coordinated by OANA SERBAN
Phase 1. 2019-2020
“Healing Romanian Patrimony. Hospitals, Health & Heritage (H.A.R.P.)” is an interdisciplinary research project dedicated to hospital-monuments in Romania. The project aims to investigate the historical buildings that belong to functionally active or temporarily closed Romanian hospitals, and which constitute forms of material / tangible cultural heritage, exposed, through the absence of sustainable financial means for conservation and restoration, to degradation, abandonment and destruction.
There are two main components of the project.
The first concerns the development of the main cultural product of the HARP project, which will consist in making the first documentary film about Romania's hospital-monuments. To produce this documentary film, theoretical research and empirical, field research will be combined. The theoretical research is carried out by specialists in heritage studies, the philosophy of medicine, the philosophy of art, aesthetics and cultural studies, who will reconstruct the cultural memory and the medical imaginary of the buildings of hospitals already certified as monuments (category A or B) or of the buildings for which evaluation and certification as forms of tangible heritage will be requested.
The empirical research is carried out by film experts, who will integrate interviews with the representatives of hospital-monuments, from those responsible for management to medical staff, into an original cultural product. Through this project, we aim to support the endeavours of the Ministry of Culture and the National Institute of Heritage in establishing a multimedia archive of hospital-monuments, developing a cultural-artistic product through which the medical and cultural sectors can work together, explaining the extent to which the maintenance, conservation and restoration of hospital-monuments should represent the complementary efforts of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Culture, optimizing the functionality of the medical space without altering the heritage-cultural dimension of the buildings.
Furthermore, the research undertaken by the HARP project team – Healing Romanian Patrimony. Hospitals, Health & Heritage – will include a separate section dedicated to medical units located in historical buildings which, not being proposed for evaluation and certification as historical monuments, have been subjected to abandonment or destruction, the space they occupied being destined for the construction of residential buildings or hypermarkets. Unfortunately, in such cases, the buildings were destroyed without documenting even their cultural and medical memory. By signalling these cases, we aim to draw the attention of the competent authorities to the risk of compromising or losing important buildings which, through their historical relevance, can be certified as monuments or can be converted into spaces with a new use, for example, medical museums, preserving the medical and cultural memory.
That is why the second component of the project consists in developing lobby campaigns with the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Health to hasten the development of public policies and legislative packages that allow the conversion of hospitals in non-functional historical buildings into medical museums. The project's subtitle, “Hospitals, Health & Heritage”, invites us to understand the manner in which the particularities of each medical space bring with them, through architectural expressions, functionality, the structure of the ensemble – from main buildings to annexes – a certain medical hermeneutics of the clinical or asylum protocol, an interpretation of the phenomenon of healing, of illness and of the tensions between life and death, relative to the cultural memory of the building, before it was converted, through all its practices, into a medical institution. Where buildings have become non-functional, the forms through which they can be reconfigured will be studied – as medical museums, while the exterior spaces – the hospital courtyards – will be transformed into open gardens and parks. Depending on the medical profile of the building, some of them will prove more promising from this latter perspective, which can compensate, of course, for the shortcomings of urban centres or peripheries, as regards the arrangement of places for recreation, rest or relaxation, within the natural landscape.
Through our project, we hope that the analysis of hospital-monuments in Romania will awaken the interest of medical and cultural operators in constituting, over time, a network of hospital-monuments in Europe, initiating projects for unifying the standards of evaluation and certification of historical buildings that host medical activities, as well as for developing European public policies on the conservation, restoration and promotion of European hospital-monuments.
According to the situation presented by the National Institute of Heritage, at present, in Romania, 137 historical buildings in which medical services are carried out are certified as cultural monuments, of which 14 are certified as belonging to group A (historical monuments of national and universal value) and 123 are monuments included in group B (evaluated as historical monuments representative of the local cultural heritage). Of the total of 137 historical buildings, 17 are ensembles and 120 are monuments. Our project team intends to reconstruct the cultural and medical memory of these institutions starting from a distinct element of their history, namely, spatial dynamics, through which it is found that many of these buildings were not originally destined for medical services, but represented spaces of protocol buildings, of churches and monasteries or military barracks and, over time, were converted into medical units, of a certain profile, which the architecture of the building favoured. For instance, the former monastic and military buildings benefit from a panopticist arrangement of the architecture, which favoured the conversion of the spaces into sanatoria or asylum institutions, for which the surveillance and control of patients is easier, there being points of medical authority arranged in the centre of the architectural ensemble and the possibility of arranging the patients concentrically, so that their medical condition and clinical evolution can be constantly monitored. During the documentation for drafting this application, several such examples of historical buildings subjected to successive conversion drew the attention of our experts, and these will be the hospitals researched during the 7 months of the project: the Neurology Hospital, built on the Haller Bastion, Sibiu (1552, converted into a hospital at the beginning of the 20th century), the former St. Anton hostel, the former hospital of the journeymen, Sibiu (15th century), Colțea Hospital (1887), the Palace of the former Civil Hospitals Administration (1886), the former headquarters of the Court of Accounts, today the Dr. Carol Davila Hospital (19th century), the General Lahovary House, today a wing of the Cantacuzino Hospital (1884), the Bucharest Military Hospital (19th century), the Witing Hospital (19th century), the P.T.T.R. Hospital (19th century), the former I.C. Brătianu Hospital in Buzău (19th century), the Gârlași Hospital in Buzău (18th century, ref. 1905-1907), the former Nifon hermitage, today a hospital (19th century), the Timiș Military Hospital (1792), the Timiș town hospital, today the Oncology and Dermato-Venereal Hospital (1744), the Brothers of Mercy Hospital in Timiș (1735), the Unified Hospital complex in Roman (18th century), the residence of the border guards' garrison, today the ENT and Physiotherapy Hospital in Miercurea Ciuc (1786), the Dr. Aristide Serfioti Military Hospital, Galați (1883), the Elisabeta Doamna Psychiatric Hospital, Galați, (1887), the Israelite Hospital, today the „Elena Doamna” Maternity, Iași (19th century), the „St. Spiridon” Hospital complex, Iași (1756), the Cantacuzino-Pașcanu Hospital, Iași (1854), the Banffy Castle, today the Borșa Psychiatric Hospital (19th century), the Sofian-Arapu House, today the Botoșani County Hospital (19th century). In total, 24 hospital-monuments.
This broad spectrum of buildings can therefore be reduced to two operational categories: hospital buildings, designed from the outset for such a functionality, and cultural buildings, castles or protocol villas, ecumenical, such as hermitages and churches, and military, such as garrisons, which were adapted, for historical, social or political reasons, to be transformed into clinical spaces. The experts co-opted into the project team will research, in an interdisciplinary manner, the dynamic-conceptual and historical evolution of the two categories, configuring multimedia archives for each researched monument-building.
The results of the theoretical and empirical research will be concentrated in the making of the documentary film “Healing Romanian Patrimony”, which will expose, by recourse to the tools of new media, the „sick Romania” of hospitals that have been spoken of less and less lately in their capacity as buildings of cultural heritage, as ensembles that preserve Romanian cultural identity in various ethoses of inter-European influence, as units in whose evaluation a medical protocol and the saving of human lives take place in spaces whose memorial and cultural identity becomes a peripheral discourse.
Through our historical investigation, critical analysis on the philosophical plane and artistic documentation, we aim to „record” the conservation and restoration problems of these institutions, to rewrite their cultural narrative in a form that is accessible, interactive and operable by experts from various fields, to expose their particularities of tangible cultural heritage while also signalling the most important medical achievements in those spaces and, finally, to „diagnose” the state of these ensembles iconic for the national history of the 16th–19th centuries, suggesting forms of „healing” through state or private interventions that are expected to be identified and implemented.
Through the H.A.R.P. platform, a solid segment will be opened for documenting and exposing the memorial dimension of the cultural heritage buildings assigned to historical hospitals in the Romanian area. Within the horizon of this analysis, what will be important are not so much the elements specific to the operational plan of certain buildings that fulfil the function of a hospital, as rather the particularities that place in disagreement the elements of architecture, ambience, décor or the aesthetic forms of the spaces destined for medical activities, with the canonical, hyper-functionalized, neutral and pragmatic structures of a medical institution.
Consequently, a series of hospitals founded from the 16th century through the 19th century will be inventoried, documented scientifically and artistically, and interpreted, in the aesthetic and philosophical key of dwelling, of the configuration of clinical or asylum spaces as institutions of control, discipline and surveillance (in the Foucauldian sense), and finally archived, for the constitution of a database dedicated to the forms of tangible cultural heritage represented by historical medical institutions.
The merit of the project “Healing Romanian Patrimony. Hospitals, Health & Heritage (H.A.R.P.)” is that of concentrating, for the first time, according to our research undertaken up to this moment, Romanian hospitals as elements of tangible cultural heritage through a multimedia platform based on the interdisciplinary research of experts from the Romanian academic, medical and cultural environment, and which has the capacity to disseminate the results of this research to the masses, through a cultural product of the kind of a documentary film.
PHASE 2. 2020-2021 – HEALING EUROPEAN CULTURAL HERITAGE: HOSPITALS, HEALTH AND HERITAGE
Research ongoing.
PhD. Oana Șerban, Teaching Assistant at the University of Bucharest and PostDoctoral Fellow of ISD has published the article Healing the Black Sea’s Patrimony: Hospitals, Health and Heritage in Balkan Journal of Philosophy 12 (2):125-132 (2020). Her research can be consulted at: https://philpapers.org/rec/ERBHTB
In order to perform a European network of experts devoted to research the role and situation of hospitals monuments, we invite you to submit an application to the following conference, that will be followed by a meeting of experts engaged in studies of cultural heritage, in order to identify mechanisms of cooperation and financing.
“SAFEGUARDING LIFE”: CULTURAL AND BIOPOLITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PATRIMONY.
CALL FOR PAPERS
THE FIRST EDITION.
HOSPITALS-MONUMENTS AS (IN)TANGIBLE FORMS OF CULTURAL HERITAGE AT THE BLACK SEA
CONTEXT
Increasing the regional attractiveness of the states across the Black Sea has never been prospected as a feasible project that might have been conceived by cultural and medical tools. Whenever experts attempt to identify new and sustainable cultural routes in the Black Sea by relating transnational elements across the Black Sea countries, the role of the hospitals placed into monumental buildings of cultural heritage, as well as the capacity of related intangible forms of cultural heritage (resulted from a certain historical and cultural understanding of health and standards for the quality of life across the Black Sea), are ignored or regarded as a peripheral concern.
Nowadays, representatives of different working groups belonging to the European institutions and commissions responsible for culturally regenerating the Black Sea insist on developing networks of museums, cultural sites or other cultural agencies such as festivals, in order to strengthen the partnership between the states that border this maritime area which needs a powerful and renewed branding.
There is no transparent effort in addressing hospitals that are placed into historical buildings as part of the cultural heritage of the Black Sea, nor any intention of insisting on their potential to be reliable candidates for inscription in the UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
The Black Sea coast is recognized for its balneary potential but health is never addressed, consequently, as a form of cultural capital whose resources and practices correspond, from their material order, to a set of intercultural comprehensive values, inherited rituals and medical knowledge. Such medical rituals lay at the core of local and national “cultures of health” that might be proposed, as well, for inscription in the UNESCO`s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage
TOWARDS A NETWORK OF HOSPITALS-MONUMENTS ACROSS THE BLACK SEA
Relevant examples of hospitals-monuments can be tracked across the Romanian territory. The Clinical Hospital of Nephrology Dr. Carol Davila, in fact, the only institution in Romania with this profile, is one of the most impressive local buildings made in neoclassical style, inspired by the model proposed by “Ospedale di S. Lazzaro e Medicanti” in Venice. Colțea Hospital, established 300 years ago, was one of the first European medical units with a social-medical mission, finding a similar format in the “Charite” hospitals in Berlin and “Guy” in London. Behind the walls of these monuments, the clinical protocol functions at high standards of excellence and performance, the last-minute medical technology being used without undermining the heritage value of the building. Sometimes, the protocol of medical recovery found correspondent practices on the Black Sea coast, whose waters have been prospected as a cure for rheumatic, nervous and arthritic disorders. As a national example, in Eforie Nord, under the patronage of King Carol I, a health resort sprang up at the end of the 19th century; nowadays, the resort is well known for the curative potential of the sapropelic mud and represents a strategic area of the Romanian Black Sea coast.
In what concerns the possibility to create a network of the hospitals-monuments belonging to the states across the Black Sea, some important historical buildings should be considered for inclusion. One of them is the building of the Russian hospital from the coast of Sevastopol, named after Pirgov on Pavlovsky cape; the city hospital of Krasnodar, built together with a complex of buildings of the poorhouse and a church, in the first part of the 19th century; the former hospital of Kavala during the Balkan wars, currently functioning as the male high school; the old hospital of Izmail, registered as a historical monument, or Museum of Health and Sultan Beyazit II Mosque, from Edirne, built in the XVth century.
On the one hand, history reveals that many of the monumental buildings of these hospitals have initially been designed and intended for military, ecclesiastical or educational functions, being subsequently converted and adapted to the medical protocol. On the other hand, the buildings of cultural heritage that could not be preserved or restored according to the clinical protocol, changed their function, being adapted to educational or commercial spaces. In the process of conversion, the cultural identity and memory of the heritage buildings were compromised or lost, along with the correspondent elements of intangible cultural heritage. Therefore, it is urgent to develop conservation and restoration policies that pay equal attention to the dynamics and the functionality of these monuments throughout history, without neglecting the local or regional priorities of safeguarding such buildings of cultural heritage.
Addressing the right concern to such institutions that perform both tangible and intangible forms of heritage following cultural patterns specific to the Black Sea means healing this area from its one of its most benign diseases: a political, economic and educational underestimation of health as a fertile, cultural resource.
OBJECTIVES
O1. To address health as a form of cultural capital.
O2. To create an international platform of dialogue and cooperation for experts from different sectors of culture in order to develop European standards for evaluating the buildings of cultural heritage in which historical hospitals are placed.
O3. To evaluate the (bio)political implications of safeguarding hospitals-monuments.
ESTIMATED OUTCOMES
• To create a network of the hospitals-monuments belonging to the states across the Black Sea.
• To identify historical buildings of such hospitals-monuments that can be proposed for inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
• To identify different medical practices and rituals inspired by the natural and balneary potential of the states across the Black Sea that developed “cultures of health” and are suitable to be recommended for inscription on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
• To develop international cultural policies of safeguarding the historical buildings that belong to the hospitals evaluated as cultural heritage monuments.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite scholars to submit their valuable contribution to this conference. Philosophical, cultural and political approaches are encouraged. Abstracts (max. 350 words) and a short professional biography (400 words) are welcomed no later than March 31 2020. Authors can submit applications to the following address: oana.serban@filosofie.unibuc.ro.
The conference will be held – depending on the conditions of the pandemic – at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, between April 23-24, 2021. Alternatively, if the pandemic situation does not allow a public event, the conference will be organized online.
ACADEMIC NETWORKING
Scholars that will take part to this event will be asked about their disposal to join a research network devoted to the analysis of tangible and intangible forms of cultural heritage inspired by health as form of cultural capital across Europe. Potential mechanisms for financing this research will be discussed after the conference with those interested in developing such a project.
For any additional information please do not hesitate to contact us by email (PhD. Oana Șerban, oana.serban@filosofie.unibuc.ro)