Health professionals and death: emotions and management ways

this article will treat two dimensions of social relations: death at the hospital , and the way in which health professionals manage their emotions regarding death and suffering. the hospital has been chosen as a privileged location for this research for it is a central and almost naturalized place concerning services directed to health, disease and death. accounting that this institution has become, in contemporary western society, the place of social delegation of care for the sick, especially those who are about to die, two public hospital units where taken as subject of ethnographic research: an intensive care unit (icu) and a palliative care hospital (pc), which attends patients with cancer "out of therapeutic possibilities". the two units present different forms of caring for the patients, in which the space and value given to the expression of feelings are also different. the analysis is centered on the way that the staff's emotions are managed, as well as on discussions regarding the contact with suffering, death and feelings wich involves the social actors.