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Studies of museum behaviour in sociology often examine how external environments shape organizational practice. Through an ethnographic study, this article considers programmes for visitors with disabilities at a major metropolitan art museum and botanical garden to ask how 'sensory conventions' vary across museums, and with what effects. I trace how museum staff construct the aesthetic experience of art and nature differently to shape how visitors use their senses, and which senses they use, when interacting with museum collections. Examining aesthetic meanings across different kinds of museums reveals these institutions' differing local cultures and how such cultures affect visitor experience. In particular, aesthetic practices across museums facilitate varying opportunities for perception, and interactions that may privilege particular embodied capacities. *Gemma Mangione is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Northwestern University with research interests in culture, health, knowledge, and organizations. Her dissertation examines how art museums and botanical gardens organize and innovate programmes for visitors with disabilities. Her research on museums has appeared in Poetics and Qualitative Sociology.Address:

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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at a major metropolitan art museum and botanic garden, this article considers the practical accomplishment of American museums' 'health turn' by tracing how museum staff develop therapeutic programmes for visitors with disabilities. In doing so, it considers one of medical sociology's fundamental theoretical questions - how ideologies of health order social life - in an unconventional empirical setting. Acknowledging contemporary arguments for both the relative merits and unintended consequences of this policy trend, I focus instead on the particular institutional arrangements, professional norms, and material cultures of art and nature that shape museums' therapeutic work, so as to reveal its effects. Data reveals ideological similarities, but practical differences, between museological and medical understandings of wellness. Extending a 'medical sociology of practice' to new contexts ultimately foregrounds the contingencies, and diversity, of therapeutic mechanisms and meanings, thereby broadening sociological research on healing and healthism.

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