by the Hospital Senses Collective
When we read Sinéad Gleeson’s words, ‘How many people have slept in this bed?’, we think of all those individual lives we do not know.[1] Each has, as they lay ill or recovering on this linen, left behind their cells and fluids, stains and tears. Who lay here before you? How many times has this sheet been washed? Who collected the linen and loaded it into a machine?
Laundry is a marginal aspect of hospital life. It goes largely unnoticed by the patient and is an everyday background activity for hospital staff. Yet the stuff of laundry is everywhere in hospital life and the sensory landscape and health of the hospital relies in part on the operations of the laundry room and its workers. Thinking about laundry allows us to consider what is at the centre of hospital operations, and what is behind the scenes. The laundry room itself is behind the scenes, historically in the basement, or in buildings outside of the main hospital site, and now increasingly processed completely off site by privatised contractors.
The material of laundry is central to the hospital. Laundered items (the gowns, cloths, tissues, curtains, bedlinen) appear everywhere: outpatient consultation spaces, waiting rooms, surgical and day wards, and surgical theatres. Laundry moves around the hospital on bodies: the hospital garments worn by medics, clothing for beds, and concealments for windows, walls, or patient bodies. It performs many tasks as cloths, tissues, swabs, wipes and dressings (which are now of course often disposable). Shaping both body and space, laundry acts as a threshold between detritus, body, space and object. Laundry is the link between the visible and the hidden, and between the seemly and unseemly aspects of the hospital.
Laundry work is often thought of as ‘dirty work’, something to be disguised, as it reveals the unruliness of the body. It stands in for the ‘matter out of place’ that spills out of our bodies.[2] We leave our traces on it, with which it travels through the hospital, stacked on trolleys, loaded into machines. As patients, the laundry stands in for our bodies. We feel its crisp bleached texture on our skin, we catch the unfamiliar smell of its stringent detergent in our nose. The smell may provide a stark contrast to our own familiar washing powder, carefully chosen for its fragrant scent with the comfort and memories that it may bring.
In this booklet, we invite you to explore the hospital by following the (often invisible) path of the laundry. As an outpatient, visitor or inpatient, as you wander around a hospital in search of a room, you may observe the routes the bales of fabrics take, collected and loaded onto trolleys and moved along the hospital corridors and into lifts. You might wonder where the old basement laundry rooms were, or recognise the vans that remove the laundry off site (out of sight) away to semi-industrial sites. You may remember the smells, the colours and stains you have made.
References
- S. Gleeson, Constellations (Picador, 2019), 113.
- M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966).
- C. Buse, D. Martin & S. Nettleton (eds), ‘Materialities of Care: Encountering health and illness through artefacts and architecture’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 40:2 (2018).
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