It was the neon lit windowless corridor in the surgery in Dumfries that did it. It was June 1993 when Maggie Keswick and her husband Charles Jencks heard the prognosis that she had two to three months to live as the breast cancer had spread to her liver and her bones. In fact Maggie was to live fighting the disease for another 18 months — she died on 8 July 1995. But she lives on every day through her inspired idea that cancer patients need a place to deal with the facts of what she called ‘the dreaded disease’. She wanted to show that things need not be so awful, that patients are not victims and that self-help is possible if you can be in the right kind of place.
This book is moving, ambitious and brave. Moving because it is highly personal; ambitious because it discusses the huge problem of modern buildings for health, and brave because, like Maggie Keswick, it is not afraid to challenge medical orthodoxy. Charles Jencks writes with a poignant strength about the whole experience he shared with his wife and how he has used his knowledge of contemporary architecture and the inspiration of Maggie’s memory to work incredibly hard to get the Caring Centres built. His co-author, Edwin Heathcote, himself a recent cancer patient, contributes a telling essay on the 3000-year history of medical buildings. He argues powerfully against the latest giant NHS hospitals, calling them ‘urban aberrations’, places that are industrial in concept. He rightly quotes the timeless words of Plato: ‘This is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body; that physicians separate the soul from the body.’
In the 15 years since her death some 12 Maggie’s Centres have been developed.

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