Health professionals and death: emotions and management ways

Abstract

This article will treat two dimensions of social relations: death at t he hospital , and the way in which health professionals manage their emotions regarding death and suff ering. The hospital has been chosen as a privileged location for this research for it is a central and almost naturalized place concerning services directed to health, disease and death. Account ing that this institution has become, in contemporary western society, the place of social de legation of care for the sick, especially those who are about to die, two public hospital units wher e taken as subject of ethnographic research: an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and a Pa lliative Care hospital (PC), which attends patients with cancer “out of therapeutic possibilit ies”. The two units present different forms of caring for the patients, in which the space and value given t o the expression of feelings are also different. The analysis is centered on the way that the staff’ s emotions are managed, as well as on discussions regarding the contact with suffering, death and feelings wic h involves the social actors.