ABSTRACT
A Cheshire Home for the incurably physically diseased seemed an appropriate place to investigate the consequences for personal identity of the omnipresence of death. Life-planning was hardly expected to be a source of personal identity for inmates of a Cheshire Home, but it was expected that time would be problematical and change it’s meaning. A Leonard Cheshire Home is a protected enclave in the margins of the world. Typically a large house in a rural setting provides a safe refuge for its residents from the intolerable and impossible demands of normal life. The inmates or patients have voluntarily entered the Home, usually with a great sense of relief and an even greater sense of privilege. Migrant southern negroes who work during the harvest months on isolated labour camps in the northern states of America have been studied as a marginal population which is stigmatized and in retreat behind ‘the relatively impermeable boundaries established by the larger society’.
