Place Attachment,Isolation,and the Power of a Window in a Hospital Environment: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper describes the relevance of the literature on environmental psychology to the coping strategies a leukemia patient used in adapting to psychological and physical isolation on a hospital bone marrow transplant unit and oncology unit. The case study describes the difficulty of place attachment on the isolation unit and its evolution on the oncology unit. The power of a window with a natural view—including a view of a cemetery—was especially evident even as the disease became terminal.