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‘Hallucination’: Hospital Ecologies in COVID’s Epistemic Instability

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Abstract

Historians and ethnographers have described biomedicine as a modernist project that imagines accumulating ever-more stable knowledge over time. This project broke down in heavily hit hospitals at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., when bureaucratic, physical and knowledge structures collapsed. A combination of terror, a partially characterized disease entity and clinicians′ inability to operate without disease models drove them to draw on rapidly changing and contradictory information via social media, changing medical practice minute-to-minute. The result was a unique form of knowing described as “hallucination”: a hyperreal, unstable ecology of imagined viral particles distributed in physical spaces, transforming with each text message and tweet. The nature, experience and practice of this ecology sheds light on what happens when instability comes to otherwise stable places.

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Author notes

  1. Zoe Boudart

    Present address: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

    Scott Stonington & Roi Livne

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  1. Scott Stonington
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  2. Roi Livne
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  3. Zoe Boudart
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Correspondence to Scott Stonington.

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Conflict of interest

Scott Stonington declares that he has no conflict of interest. Roi Livne declares that he has no conflict of interest. Zoe Boudart declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The research for this article was approved by the University of Michigan’s Institutional Review Board—Health Sciences and Behavioral Sciences (Approval ID#: HUM00179473).

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Stonington, S., Livne, R. & Boudart, Z. ‘Hallucination’: Hospital Ecologies in COVID’s Epistemic Instability. Cult Med Psychiatry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-023-09834-4

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