No place for dying : American hospitals and the ideology of rescue

The U.S. hospital embodies society's hope for itself--a technological bastion standing between us and death. What does the gold standard of rescue, as ideology and industry, mean for the dying patient in the hospital and for the status of dying in American culture? This book shows how dying is a management problem for hospitals, occupying space but few billable encounters and of little interest to medical practice or quality control. An anthropologist and bioethicist with two decades of professional nursing experience, Helen Chapple goes beyond current work on hospital care to present fine-grained accounts of the clinicians, patients, and families who navigate this uncharted, untidy, and unpredictable territory between the highly choreographed project of rescue and the clinical culmination of death. This book and its important social and policy implications make key contributions to the social science of medicine, nursing, hospital administration, and health care delivery fields.--publisher description Cover Half Tittle Title Page Copyright Page Conents Introduction Chapter 1 Hospital Dying Situations Chapter 2 Rescue, Stabilization, and Speed Chapter 3 Configuring Dying and Death Chapter 4 Death with as Little Dying as Possible Chapter 5 “Every Medical Action Is a Transaction”: Rescue as Industry Chapter 6 How Rescue as Industry Minimizes Dying Chapter 7 Order out of Chaos: The Ritual of Intensification Chapter 8 Ritual Display, Palliative Care, and Trust Chapter 9 Making a Place for Dying in the Hospital Appendix References Index About the Author