ABSTRACT
I’ve been collecting Hospital Land representations of all kinds intensively for seven years (and less concertedly for seven years before that). I’ve watched movies and television shows; read ethnographies, memoirs, plays, novels, poetry, magazines, and scholarly articles. I’ve snipped articles and advertisements out of newspapers (primarily the New York Times) and magazines, and photographed ads for Hospital Land services and charities that I encountered in public spaces. For the past few years (2012-2015), I’ve saved about one-fourth of the reams of HospitalLand-generated mail that has been sent to me, my partner, Gregg, and his sister, Merry, who lived with us for four months before her death in 2012.1
In this chapter, I o er a discourse analysis of this collection of representations of Hospital Land in U.S. culture that were created over the past 50 years or so. Real life and ¤ctional narratives of Hospital Land abound in all this cultural material created by journalists, scholars (mostly sociologists, anthropologists, and historians), practitioners (doctors, nurses, midwives), patients, poets, performers, playwrights, novelists, television writers, screenwriters, visual artists, and advertisement copywriters. ese cultural
creators seek to demonstrate the workings of Hospital Land in a wide variety of ways; these narratives range from full-scale historical treatments to episodic snapshots to propaganda (advertisements and direct mailing campaigns) designed to raise funds for Hospital Land endeavors.
