Life in the hospital: a review.

The ethnographic study of hospitalized patients' social worlds and individual experience, a once flourishing research tradition, has now largely vanished from the literature of social science. The disappearance of this tradition is accounted for by changes in the character of hospitals--decreasing lengths of stay, expansion of specialized units, and medicine's increased technical sophistication--that have weakened patients' social worlds and, perhaps, made patients' experience less consequential for health outcomes. If the ethnographic study of hospital patients is revitalized, it will take shape around a view of the patient as a newly empowered participant in decision-making processes.