ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the blame for whatever inadequacies of comfort work may occur primarily on the staff's usual "technical medical-nursing care first, comfort care second" focus, along with the technological and organizational features of medical and nursing work. It presents several vignettes taken from field notes to illustrate some of their features in relation to other kinds of work and to phases of trajectories. The chapter discusses the complexities of comfort work—and what happens when there is disagreement about it—as well as the specific organizational conditions for doing or not doing this work. The overwhelming prevalence of patients bedded down with chronic illness in the hospital means there is a great deal of illness-related discomfort that requires handling by the staff, and inevitably by the patients, too. The various technicians who move in and out of patients' rooms are very much focused on their technical tasks and very little trained in the niceties or the physiological technicalities of comfort care.
