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What do we think, better yet, what fills the public imagination when confronted with HOSPITAL? If a hospital room could speak, what would it tell us? What would it want us to know, what secrets would it share? Covert conversations? Stories of recovery and renewal? Epiphanies on what’s most important? Or disappointments, banality, private embarrassments, and the dehumanization of our demise?

If we go beyond the literary to the philosophical, that is, a philosophy of hospital, would it be riddled primarily with “essentialists” debates on the true nature of hospital? Would it be saddled with a genealogy of hospital moral reasoning or critiques of pure hospital. Would we now be, in this day and age, at the end of hospital history?

What about studies of hospital language? How does a hospital speak? What is its ‘lingua franca’; does it posses a power medical discourse that makes irrelevant any local or native speech that enters its field of influence? In a postmodern deconstruction of the hospital text, would “to hospital” someone invoke a surveillable identity?

And where would Marxists place the hospital in their scientific understanding of social and economic class relations? Or Adam Smith, for that matter, what would a free market hospital look like?

And if this literary exploration, and philosophical backdrop were seen as a reflective and legitimate intellectual pursuit, would we then engender a field of hospital theory with legions of hospital theorists researching change, adaptation or the disenchantment of hospitals? What would the historical fossil records of hospitals reveal to the modern consciousness? Would we have experiments in competing theoretical models of hospitaling?

In other words, how would something that has so ossified in our current scheme of things be different, radically different?