Hospital Life

I spend most of my days in the hospital environment (well I should anyway) and am continually honoured with the priviledge of finding out the most personal and intimate details of total strangers' lives.
Your relationship with patients should be very special and often many of us forget that we are talking to real people who were probably up most of the night before worrying about the great disinfected (or MRSA infected) unknown that is hospital. The prosaic and the routine for us is often the biggest event in their lives.
Mere Comments spent some time in hospital recently. His last 2 paragraphs express a reflection I've been thinking about recently.
"It's been a while since I have spent much time in a hospital environment, but having just experienced a little bit of it recently, I can say it felt a bit alien in its clinical assembly line proficiency mixed with the soap-sex saturated culture that views the body as a complex machine with appetites.
Don't get me wrong. I admire the technical skills and the knowledge the medical profession has conerning the 'mechanical' aspects of the body. It's just that, pretty much like the rest of the culture, do they even know what the body is for any longer? Maybe long-term amnesia has set in."