ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses some aspects of the health care providers work with peoples' bodies, sometimes labelled 'dirty work'. She examines how this work is socially structured and gendered, how it is understood, interpreted and ranked in different medical contexts. The notion 'dirty work' itself needs to be explored and also things as theoretical and practical tasks are challenged. The author looks at certain attributes of the body in its increasingly privatized and ambiguous contemporary state. She also examines a particularly intimate aspect of medical treatment that related to bowel incontinence, to illuminate the case. In a Norwegian study of the medical status of a range of diseases, there was a clear hierarchy of medical interventions. Concerning the doctors, the medical examination involves physical work on actual bodies. When an intimate examination procedure is linked to medical science and contextualized, the body waste ceases to be concrete.
