ABSTRACT
This chapter expects that patients were exceedingly active in confronting both the facts of hospital life and immediate or dawning recognition of their own illnesses. It considers that patients and staff participated in the hospital as an arena: that patients could also be viewed as coping with and negotiating such pertinent issues as transfer, shape, rules, treatments, and agreements. A host of other highly individual and concrete problems make a patient's progress toward an adequate level of functioning within a reasonable span of time imperative. The issue of transfer most frequently involves many interested parties: The nurses may bring pressure directly upon the attending physician and the aides indirectly through the nurses; the administration may intervene; even the other patients may get into the act, their spokesman advocating transfer. The patient population of 3North can best be characterized as stratified according to the degree that its members behave "sensibly" and "civilly".
