Abstract

The historical shift in the function of the hospital from an asylum for the care of the indigent sick to a medical‐therapeutic institution is intimately associated with the exploitation of the hospital as a clinical facility. Thus, over the course of the 19th century the space of the hospital and its disciplinary structure was permeated and reorganized by clinical practices.Drawing on the example of the Charite hospital in Berlin, it can be shown how the historical shift in the hospital's outward social function went hand in hand with the creation of a differentiated internal clinical space. In this compartmentalized clinical space the discipline of the hospital was replaced with methods of clinical examination, techniques of observation, and procedures of documentation, all of which helped to transform the hospital into a knowledge‐space.