ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on some of the ways in which comfort has been discussed and reflected upon in his research with visitors and staff members of Maggie’s, an organisation which provides practical, emotional and social support for people with cancer, their families and friends. The author draws on David Bissell’s understanding of comfort as a ‘highly complex sensibility’ which can be characterised, concurrently, as ‘an objective capacity’, ‘an aesthetic sensibility’ and ‘a specific affective resonance’, where comfort may be enacted through the relations between individual bodies, objects and environments. Maggie’s Centres allow different spatial practices, encouraged through a range of objects and furnishings, and a qualitatively different sense of time (for reflection, for sociability). These buildings offer recognition of cancer as an illness experienced by individuals as well as a disease to be treated through clinical protocols, in which the role of comfort is central to how care is approached.
