Abstract
The hospital administrator quoted in Chapter 3 wished to insert a clear bright
line between those who are dying and those who are dead. His attempt at
demarcation is more effective if the two entities being separated are the public and death. As industrialized society has made it possible to confine death
to the hospital and also within it, the distance between the living and those
who might be dying is increased (Mellor and Shilling 1993). The hospital
space protects the general public from the bedside and vice versa; clinicians
caring for patients represent society and act as its agents (van der Geest and
Finkler 2004). As such, they carry out the mandates of society, whether they
are aware of it or not. It is not surprising that the spaces of the hospital
where the open-ended altruism of life-saving occurs exhibit greater cultural
endorsement than other spaces. In these spaces, highly trained individuals
solve diagnostic puzzles (Kuhn 1996), enact procedures, and perform technological displays such as intensive care, surgery, and angiography. Other
clinical spaces such as rehabilitation, psychiatry, or palliative care units may
appear more humdrum by comparison, deprived of the potential for a dramatic turnaround. They command a lower rate of reimbursement, or none
at all. Here the activities of chronic illness and dying may play out, unlit.