Feeling Blue: Colour and the Modern British Hospital

Feeling blue is the first book-length history of colour in modern hospitals. It examines colour in relation to six key themes - hygiene, emotion, humanisation, homeliness, play, consumerism - which are tied together by the idea of the ’modern’ hospital. The book does not simply describe changes to the appearance of hospitals over time, but instead thinks expansively about the role of colour in shaping how hospitals felt. It uses colour to understand the layered meanings of modernity in twentieth-century Britain, and its relationship to the ’mundane’ or everyday life of hospitals.

Victoria Bates is Associate Professor in Modern Medical History at the University of Bristol