It is not a bit like an English hospital.’ This was the reaction that the architecture of the CMS hospital for women in Isfahan, Persia, elicited from the newly arrived missionaries in the early twentieth century. The hospital had inpatient, outpatient, isolation and private blocks familiar to the missionaries but the specific design and arrangement of the buildings and the mode of occupation they engender appeared very different. Planned with almost no reference to the prevailing hospital design principles in Britain, the buildings were arranged to form an enclosed compound and were designed to facilitate free movement between the different parts of the hospital (Figure 2.1). Not only the Isfahan hospital but also some of the hospitals in north-western British India were judged in this way: ‘at first one feels “How different to an English hospital”,’ wrote Miss D. Mellowes in 1919 about her first impressions of work in the Multan hospital. Likewise, Miss F. M. Clarke referred to the Peshawar hospital in 1922 as ‘this most un-English hospital’. Not all mission hospitals planned differently from conventional models of the period in Britain. In contrast to the Isfahan, Peshawar and Multan hospitals, the hospital of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews in Safed, for example, was described as ‘English-Like’. But they functioned, and some were designed, to gain the trust of the local communities.

This chapter is the first among the three that focus on hospital buildings. They examine various architectural configurations the CMS medical missionaries developed to obtain trust and friendship while showing that mission hospitals could not impress upon patients (and visitors) in any simple way. The focus of this chapter is mainly on the design characteristics of the master plan of the hospitals and the general wards, and the following two chapters examine specialised buildings constructed for a whole family and female patients. Meanwhile, they go beyond a mere focus on the layout and appearance to consider smell, taste, touch and sound.

These three chapters also raise questions concerning the internationalisation of hospital architectural forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.