‘Sacraments ’ in the Hospital: Exploring the Magic and Religion of Recovery

This article proposes to look at the ritual dimension of hospital work, a chain of words and acts, which fill patients with hope for a ‘future life’. Conventional boundaries between magic, science and religion are reconsidered. The author argues that biomedi-cine, far from being a cultural no-man’s land, represents the basic values of culture. It provides a space where doctors, nurses and patients find their deepest convictions and values demonstrated and confirmed. Medical words and interventions express and re-create people’s belief in the canons of science and biomedicine as ultimate truth. Pointing out the religious dimension of medicine in no way belittles medicine’s role and therapeutic efficacy. Rather it provides us with a better understanding of the ‘mechanics’ of recovery. Hospitals in the ‘Western world ’ have been characterised as places of secularisation at the fringes of life. While it has been commonly observed that religion becomes more prominent when life is in jeopardy, the opposite seems to happen in modern hospitals where religious agents have become nearly out of place, at least in my own society, The Netherlands. Medical scientists and technicians have taken over the role of priests and other religious specialists in times of crisis and in the face of death. Such, at least, is the popular view. Medicine has become thoroughly secularised. The purpose of this article is to point out that this view of hospitals as unreligious places is based on a misunderstanding of what religion and science are. The con-ventional definition of religion as faith in supernatural beings typifies the naivete ́ of the—supposed—non-believer. My argument is that secularisation and medicalisa-tion constitute processes of cultural change within religion, as hospital care addresses people’s ultimate concerns regarding the purpose of life