The Doctor's House

The Temple of Aesculapius (no date)

A visit to the doctor's house (no date 17th century)

A Visit to the Doctor (no date 18th century)

Images (non-copyright) courtesy The National Library of Medicine at http://oli:lhc.nlm.nih.gov/

The Doctor's House:  A Tradition?

As these images suggest, visiting the doctor's house appears to be a long-standing European tradition in medical history.  My father-in-law can describe in detail the house that he grew up in, located in Dursely, England, where his father was the town doctor for many years.  The house was built sometime around the turn of the 19th century and was appropriately named "Galen's House".

Similarly, in a discussion with The Canadian Museum of Health and Medicine curator Felicity Pope, she recalled living in a house in rural England where her father practiced.   Locally, the same phenomenon continues to occur.  From my own grandfather to the archivist at the Ontario Archives, everyone appears to remember a story about "the doctor's house". Many of these buildings have since been converted into purely residential space, but somehow, they seem to retain the character of identifiable medical space.  In addition, my impromptu survey has also lead me to conclude that home practises were common well into the first part of the twentieth century.   Realizing that the study of doctor's homes could easily span centuries, I decided at this point to focus my study on the 19th century.

Next, I began to look for Canadian examples of doctor's houses that may still be standing and/or functioning as a medical space. Historic House Museums preserved to a specific period and doctor, although frozen unnaturally in time, are nearer to the authenticity I was looking for.  I began with the Hillary House in Aurora, Ontario, which became my central case study.  I also spoke with the curator of Helmcken House in Victoria, British Columbia which has a sizeable collection of medical artifacts, but was not the location of the doctor's practice.  Finally, I spoke with an Assistant Curator at  Hutchinson House in Peterborough, Ontario.  Dr. Hutchison practised in the rural community during the early part of the 19th century, and his house was built by local townspeople attempting to discourage the doctor from moving away.  

After realizing that it is very difficult to define a specific "type" of architectural design characteristic of a doctor's house, I began to explore the Horwood architectural collection at the Ontario Archives.   Here I discovered that, by the mid to late 19th century there were several local architects who appear to have specialized in the design of doctor's houses.  Dick, Burke, and Langley are the names commonly associated with the construction of doctor's homes in the Southern Ontario region, either independently or in partnership with each other. Coupled with a growing body of contemporary history about architecture and the 19th century sanitation science movement (see Annamarie Adams latest work Architecture In the Family Way:  Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900, Adams, 1996 and, specifically, her chapter "Doctor's as Architects") I began to feel that I had finally found a topic.

Continue to next page:  A Case Study:  The Hillary House Koffler Museum of Medicine

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