Le travail en chambre mortuaire : invisibilité et gestion en huis clos

How does society manage the deceased? Often located in the most remote section of a hospital, forsaken by nurses, doctors, and management, even stigmatized, hospital mortuaries admit nearly one out of two deceased persons. They thus represent one of the main places receiving the dead in France. Hospital employees, morticians, funeral directors, the representatives of religions, etc., a full micro-society develops there at the borderline between medicine and funerals, a paradoxical place where hierarchies bump against each other. Fieldwork is used to describe how bodies are taken in charge inside hospital mortuaries. By emphasizing the chain of acts of collaboration in the handling of corpses, questions are raised about each person's role and the scope of this collective work.