Dealing with the dead patient: Nurses and post-mortem care

This paper outlines the development and nature of standardization of hospital death in Norway. I argue that, in the late modern context, standardisation of hospital death is a multidimensional affair, embedded in a far more comprehensive framework than the medico-legal one. In the late modern Norwegian hospital, interdisciplinary negotiation and cooperation has opened up for a number of parallel agendas and ‘brokering’ of death to coexist, without this ensuing in any loss of the medical power-holder’s authority. I argue that death in the clinic has become a multiple affair, embedded in material, social, legal, ethical, aesthetical, and economical practice – at collective as well as individual levels. This paper explores the various ways in which nurses deal with the dead patient. I disentangle the care of the dead person from the reverence for the human remains. Throughout post-mortem care, nurses oscillate between poles of proximity and distance to the dead patient, experienced alternately as a sentient person or an inanimate body. It is shown how positions of proximity and distance are key resources with which nurses manage their exposure to death in their dealings with the dead.