Paper short abstract:

This paper questions the tacit assumption that healing and pleasure are invariably opposed categories by examining the central place that art, aesthetics and architecture occupy in German Rehabilitative Medicine.

Paper long abstract:

This paper questions the tacit assumption that healing and pleasure are invariably opposed categories by examining the central place that art, aesthetics and architecture occupy in German Rehabilitative Medicine. Based on an ethnography of a Reha (rehabilitation) Klinik (hospital) in Germany, it delineates how the very architecture of the Klinik, situated between a mountain park (Kur Park) and a Therme (hot spring), functions as a symbolic, pleasurable and therapeutic resource. Here the symbolic and the pleasurable, rather than being either accidental or an unintended fall out, are self consciously mobilised and are central to therapeutic efficacy. Through a description and analysis of the German 'Reha', which is part of orthodox (bio)medicine in the German context, the paper will invite us to rethink the relationship between the healing arts and aesthetics. It will ask whether the aesthetics of appeal - visual, aural, bodily, psychic or moral - often seen as being superfluous or a ruse, and usually confined to the margins of healing, rather than the serious business of curing, needs to be rethought.