Slowing Down Medicine: The Plural Worlds of Hospice Care

Abstract

This ethnography reflects on a non-profit hospice care organization in the Midwestern US where caregivers “slow down” medical care by acknowledging the plurality of forces that constitute the illness experience, philosophically departing from their biomedical, non-hospice counterparts. It demonstrates the ontological effect of “slowing down” and attending to a set of patient problems that extends beyond the biological, or any distinct, domain. The result is a medical world that privileges the embodied, lived expression of disease—rather than the statistical, clinical expression—resulting in medical care that is enmeshed in the variables of everyday life. I therefore situate hospice care in a historical moment witnessing the emergence of a sophisticated and “non-modern” (Latour 1991) form of medical care.

Keywords

• Hospice Care
• slow medicine
• care
• ontology