My new book, Bodies of Light, follows the heroine Ally from home through school to medical training in a hospital in the 1880s, a path away from a dysfunctional family towards selfhood defined by success as one of the first female doctors in Britain.

I'm interested in writing about institutions because they are almost always in some sense utopian projects, attempts to intervene in the ways of the world. Schools, hospitals, orphanages, reformatories of all kinds, begin with the idea that an organisation could make things better, redress some of the damage we do to each other. And usually, whether they succeed in the original aim or not, institutions end up doing damage of their own, because power corrupts and visions don't work in practice and we are all hopeful but fallen beings.

I find hospitals particularly fascinating because of the harmony or discord between the stories of nurses, patients and doctors, and because of the complicated relationships between power, suffering and healing. Even in the late 19th century of my novel when far more people were born and died at home, hospitals were by definition sites of major life events shaped by institutional ritual.

1–5: in the asylum

Every novelist loves a madhouse. We spend hours in the company of imaginary friends ourselves and the research is more fun and easier to fudge than learning about cardiology or neurosurgery.

Set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh during the first world war, Pat Barker's Booker prize winner focuses on the work of Dr William Rivers with victims of shell-shock and trauma. The hospital is a place of healing, where there is some space for attempts to redress the damage of war, but it is in the end a military institution that exacts the final loyalty of its most ambitious employees. In a novel with few female characters, the exploration of different kinds of masculinity in a time of war is deeply engaging.

The fictional child of RD Laing and Foucault, a novel in which the asylum is a prison for the punishment of those who have offended social norms without breaking the law. There is nothing redemptive about this hospital, where the authorities represented by "The Combine" use every tactic from lying and manipulation to lobotomy to control patients.

Frame's writing is always beautiful. A fictionalised account of her own incarceration, written with such lightness of touch that it's exhilarating to read despite the grim subject.

Bible of generations of clever and misunderstood teenage girls, Plath's coming-of-age novel seems to affirm a connection between madness and creativity. Esther Greenwood, taking an English degree at an elite women's college not unlike Plath's, sees a rapidly approaching choice between marriage and a literary career. Unable to commit to either, her actions become increasingly chaotic until she attempts suicide and is admitted first to a state hospital and then, following the intervention of the novelist who funds her university scholarship, to a private institution where she is kindly treated by female doctors and nurses. This hospital becomes the complement to Esther's college education, a place where she can learn possible modes of survival for an intelligent woman in 1950s America.

Based on the true and strange overlap of John Clare and Alfred Tennyson in a Victorian lunatic asylum (only Clare was a patient), Foulds's novel is a model of the beauty that can be achieved with a restricted setting and characters dictated by the historical record.

6-10: The best hospital novels explore the relationships between clinical healing and less measurable kinds of recovery

Something of a blockbuster, set mostly in Addis Ababa where gifted doctors wash up one by one in an under-resourced but profoundly humane institution. Verghese is a doctor himself, which shows in the depth of the portrayals of medical establishments in Ethiopia and the US. Relationships between doctors structure a narrative that also explores the limits of what medicine can do for individual patients and for nation states. A shame about the pile-up of coincidences at the end …

In a similar vein to Cutting for Stone, a novel set in Sierra Leone in the years after the civil war, where talented local doctors drift reluctantly towards emigration while Europeans arrive full of missionary zeal. Adrian Lockheart (hard not to hear the echo of Craiglockhart) is a psychologist come from London to share expertise in PTSD, is almost overwhelmed by the ubiquity of extreme trauma. Kai Mansaray, an orthopaedic surgeon who grew up and lived through the civil war, wields more obvious solutions to individual suffering. Neither of them shares the complicated and possibly guilty knowledge of Elias Cole, an academic who has survived to old age in a brutal regime. Forma explores the complicated motivations for "helping people".

Another novel set in a wartime hospital, winning the Booker the year after Regeneration. Four damaged people find themselves and each other in an Italian villa being used as a field hospital at the end of the second world war. The English patient, László Almásy – who is in fact not English – knows that he is dying. As he sinks and surfaces on morphine, he tells the story of his affair with a married Englishwoman in north Africa. There is no prospect of physical healing, for Almásy nor, by the time the atomic bombs have fallen at the end, for the world, but narrative has belated and secondary consolations of its own.

Middlemarch tends to be the one novel taught in medical schools, as if the very name of George Eliot has healing powers. Very little of the novel is set in the town's hospital, but Dr Lydgate's project to bring reform to local medical practice represents his doomed optimism about the future of provincial life and English medicine.

The literature of the sanatorium probably deserves a list of its own, but Mann's classic is one of the first and best studies of institutional life. The reader is never entirely sure if the hero, Hans Castorp, is really ill or succumbing to the pleasures of institutionalisation. In an Alpine sanatorium for tuberculosis at the beginning of the 20th century, the rituals of mealtimes, carefully prescribed walks, rests and consultations leave the patients little to do but watch each other and try not to think about death.