‘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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