No Place for Dying

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.

Helen Stanton Chapple

Introduction; 1: Hospital Dying Situations; 2: Rescue, Stabilization, and Speed; 3: Configuring Dying and Death; 4: Death with as Little Dying as Possible; 5: "Every Medical Action Is a Transaction"; 6: How Rescue as Industry Minimizes Dying; 7: Order out of Chaos; 8: Ritual Display, Palliative Care, and Trust; 9: Making a Place for Dying in the Hospital