Rituals in the Hospital essays

Rituals in the Hospital essays Ritual has been defined as standardized ceremonies in which expressive, symbolic, mystical, sacred, and nonrational behavior predominates over practical, technical, secular, rational, and scientific behavior, although anthropologists have acknowledged that rational, technical acts may occur as part of ritual behavior (Katz, Pearl). Rituals are performed for various reasons, not only in religious situations. The article Ritual in the Operating Room discusses both ritual and science in one technical context, the hospital operating room. It talks about the ritualized movements within the operating room and what the three stages are in the operating room. I will also describe other situations in which rites of passage are used. One of the rituals of the operating room is scrubbing. It is a process in which certain people have to wash their hands and lower arms very rigorously and precisely. The purpose is to remove any bacteria that may be under the nails or on the arm. Not everybody scrubs, only the people who actually operate or do assist in the surgery. Mainly, it is the surgeon, assistant surgeon, and the scrub nurse who participate in the scrubbing ritual. It is a seven minute procedure, every person is sure to use the full time to make sure all the bacteria is gone. After they are scrubbed it is important not to touch anything that would contaminate their clean hands and arms, so the assistant nurse helps them into their gown and sterile gloves. In the operating room objects and people are classified as sterile or nonsterile. Nonsterile objects are clean, dirty, or contaminated. No part of the nurse or the anesthesiologist is sterile. Certain parts of the surgeon and the scrub nurse are classified as sterile. If a part of the surgeon becomes contaminated there is a process of scrubbing again and ridding of the contaminated objects to become sterile again. ...