ABSTRACT
Sentimental work has been profoundly affected by the same changes in disease prevalence and medical organization. The essential characteristics of chronic illness suggest immediately that these diseases impinge frequently and sometimes harshly on sick person's situational interactions, on their long-term interpersonal relationships with significant others, on their moods and passing psychological states, on their very identities. The medical work is usually done by total or relative strangers to the patient: they may know little about that person's identity, or his/her medical and social biographies, or attitudes toward illness, bodies, treatments, or themselves. The great number of procedures and machine-related tasks done and for patients exposes them to potential loss of composure, whether poise, face, or self-control. Around a patient who has been hospitalized for a few days, let alone been previously hospitalized once or twice, there builds up a thick dossier of documents which constitutes the medical record.
