Operating room

“Our hypothesis is that by the post-Second World War period, spaces for science prevailed over earlier architectural references, such as the theatre and classroom. . . . The post-war enshrinement of the operating room as a space of experimental science can thus be understood within the framework of surgery’s broad aspirations of being a science (Adams & Schlich, 304) . . . . the growing resemblance of operating rooms to laboratories registers the common aim of surgeons and scientists to control life processes. The ideal scientific laboratory is a place that creates conditions that allow the investigator to control life phenomena at will. Like, surgery is a ‘technology of control’ (308). Increase of control by design can be traced in the three types of surgical arrangements at the Royal Victoria Hospital [that] roughly correspond to the Victorian operating theater, the interwar surgical suite, and the post-war operating room (or ‘OR’)” (309). . . . The principle of control is even more central in the third type of surgical environment, the completely isolated, mechanically illuminated, international-style surgical environment with even smaller, more laboratory-like rooms (323) . . . . Rather than a performance in itself, surgery by the 1050s was less of a spectacle and more concerned with replicability, reliability, and control. Material evidence of this change is in the smallness, the exclusivity of the space, and a strict code of behavior, modeled on the scientific laboratory” (324).