Research On The Origin, Development And Social Motivation Of Missionary Hospitals In Wuhan(1864-1953)

The architecture of hospital, as one of the most complex architectures with various structure, is closely correlated to the development of medicine, modern architecture and sociology. Since 1863 when Hankou opened its harbor and the first western mission hospital was established, many modifications have been made on the hospital structure by introducing the characteristics of traditional Chinese architectures. However, while combining these two different styles together, the characteristics of western mission hospital are well preserved and still play an essential role on influencing today's hospital architecture in China. In order to clarify the history of the development of hospital architecture and figure out the evolution of this specific type of architecture, the paper focus on analyzing modern hospitals under different periods with the consideration of connections between architecture, medicine and social characteristics.The paper firstly evaluate the hospital's space structure with comparison between the architecture of today's hospital and missionary hospital is presented together with the enumeration of evolving features. Then the significant changes within the structure in various time periods are recognized through analyzing typical examples from sociological perspective, more specifically, by estimating the temporary social characteristic and the corresponding architecture the connection between social factors and architecture is built which validates the effects of social evolution on architecture development. With the observations of the influences from diverse social factors on development of missionary hospital during its localization, the paper are able to divide the evolution of missionary hospital into several independent periods which demonstrate the relations between missionary hospital and local church.To address the significance of missionary hospital, the paper concentrate on the social factor of missionary hospitals and declare its influences on both medical architectures within Wuhan and the development of local society. Besides, the contributions of missionary hospital on medical concept, public health, propagation of western medicine, feminism and urban morphology are also proposed within this section. Explain the mechanism of medical society.By estimating the evolution of modern missionary hospital in different time periods with the consideration of the relations between multiple areas, the effectiveness of methodology which utilizes multi-perspectives analysis has been validated. Further, during the estimation of mutual influence of missionary hospital and temporal society characteristics, the historical value of missionary hospital as well as its evolution principle are proposed in order to provide reasonable suggestions for the development of today's hosptials.