Feeling Mission Hospitals in Persia and British India

with Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi

In this talk, I will discuss my book titled Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914. The book argues that medical missions should be viewed as ‘emotional set-ups’ that served to change the sensory relationship between missionaries and local people. Here I discuss the architecture of the medical missions built by the London-based Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Persia and North-western British India. I show how missionaries disregarded their scientific and sanitary ideals in favour of providing a space that could feel ‘familiar’. I then make some speculations regarding the ‘affective lives’ of mission hospitals. I do so through an especial reference to the Kerman and Yazd hospitals, both of which are listed as a national heritage by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Handicraft and Tourism of Iran. I highlight the promise of emotions history to understand colonial buildings’ diverse and sometimes contradictory affective lives.

About the speaker:

Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi is Humboldt Research Fellow at Art History Institute, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin (2021-22), and a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the University of Edinburgh (2019-20). She studied for her PhD in University College Dublin, where she was an Irish Research Council (IRC) doctoral scholar. Her research interests address the multifaceted origins of ideas and practices in the history of international health and architecture and consider the history of emotions as a way of doing architectural history.

On the left: The men hospital in Kerman.

On the top: The women hospital in Kerman.