Medicine: Pink Palace of Healing

The most modern, most ingeniously designed hospital in the U.S. is the University of Texas new M. D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute in Houston.

Far too many U.S. hospitals are antiquated, inefficient and unsightly, from the scurvy brick of their exteriors to the .scaly boilers of the steam-heating plants. In crowded corridors the wagon bearing a sheeted corpse may collide with another carrying the patients’ lunches. In most wards, with 20 or more beds, the quiet and relaxation essential to recovery are impossible, and even private rooms are drab, fitfully heated and ill-ventilated. There are some gleaming exceptions, among them the Clinical Center of the National Institute of Health at Bethesda, Md., the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Los Angeles, the Jefferson Medical College Hospital’s new pavilion in Philadelphia. But no U.S. hospital has been more carefully designed to avoid the old inadequacies than Houston’s Anderson.*

Flow Patterns. Conceived five years ago by its energetic director, Cancer Surgeon Randolph Lee Clark Jr., Anderson incorporates virtually all the features that any hospital architect, administrator or doctor has ever suggested to promote efficiency and comfort. The difference begins at the doors. Patients enter the building (shaped like a letter T, but with an added crossbar like an F) from the west, doctors and nurses from the south, administrative personnel from the southeast, research workers from the east, students from the north. In the wings housing the hospital’s 310 beds, vertical and horizontal flow have been skillfully coordinated not only for the most efficient treatment but also to promote research and teaching. For example, a patient admitted for chemical cancer treatment goes to the fifth floor. On the same level with him is the research laboratory working on his particular type of cancer, along with the doctors studying cases of this kind and nurses who specialize in their care.

Projecting from the basement up to a portion of the fifth floor is the vertical “stack,” in which all radioactive materials are handled. For these, like other hospitals specializing in cancer, Anderson has special areas surrounded by lead and concrete safeguards.

Host of Gadgets. To the patient himself, the most conspicuous features of the ultramodern hospital are conveniences and creature comforts. First comes privacy: there are single and double rooms, and four-bed wards—nothing bigger. Every room is air-and sound-conditioned. Each has a two-way intercom system connecting with the nearest nurses’ station, to save time, trouble, steps and tempers. Instead of hospital buff, most rooms are decorated with restful greys or greens, punctuated with cheery areas of brighter color. Pictures are changed often, but when the patient can stand the sight of one no longer, the nurse can turn its face to the wall (the back is a contrasting but harmonious color). At the head of each bed is a radio outlet into which an under-the-pillow speaker or earphones can be plugged. Outside each private room is a sun porch.

Anderson Hospital has a host of gadgets, e.g., dumbwaiters to carry equipment and supplies from floor to floor and pneumatic tubes big enough so that they can carry medical records, medicines and small instruments. Food is served from a central kitchen, put in individual meal packs and delivered from a heated wagon.

Operating rooms are in pairs around a central group of instrument and scrub rooms so that a busy surgeon need lose not a minute between operations, and in certain cases can let them overlap. The old theater design is gone. Medical students no longer need to peer over each other’s shoulders, straining for a view of a master-surgeon’s deft-fingered skill. A TV camera relays a color image to viewing rooms throughout the hospital. A two-way phone system enables the surgeon to explain what he is doing, while graduate students can ask him to clear up details. And in the operating rooms doctors and nurses wear soft green—easier on the eyes and on the TV lens than white.

The Façade. When Dr. Clark started trying to translate his dream hospital into reality, he could figure on an appropriation of only $1,750,000. Working with Dr. Frederick C. Elliott, overall director of the Texas Medical Center, he picked a firm of Houston architects (MacKie & Kamrath) that had never designed a hospital and so had no preconceived ideas. Then he called in as consultant a Chicago firm (Schmidt, Garden & Erikson) that had built 150 of them. One of the innovations concerned the facade. The architects found that they could save and have a stronger wall if they faced it with about an inch of pink Georgia marble. Thanks to the rosy marble, Houstonians speak affectionately of the Anderson Hospital, now a $9,000,000 reality, as “the pink elephant.”

*Named for Monroe D. Anderson, wealthy Houston cotton broker, who died in 1939 and left his fortune for “good works.”