ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore how healthcare professionals can integrate spiritual comfort and care into their professional healthcare practices in collaboration with patients and, when relevant, their family members. Specifically, it explores how they can draw on anthropological knowledge to achieve this. The common view of the healthcare institution as supposedly secularized and neutral conceals how the everyday practice of medicine is filled with rituals and symbols that infuse comfort and hope in both patients and healthcare professionals. Some researchers even claim that in contemporary society medicine has taken on the role of religion, with people turning to medicine and hospitals to give birth, to be healed, and to die. Two situations from fieldwork illustrate the use of rituals and symbolic acts by physicians and nurses ‘as occasions for hopeful magic’ in order to comfort patients and family members in the course of everyday healthcare.
