The Semiotics of Western Hospitals: From a Stone Boat in Rome to Reconstructing the Self in Montreal

In this article I contrast the semiotic role of the hospital from its creation in Rome in the 2nd century BC with several contemporary Montreal hospitals. The hospital was founded as a site to isolate the sick to limit the symbolic pollution of the allegedly perfect social body of the Roman state. Today, however, the hospital has become a semiotic engine that allows patients to construct a new temporal matrix and affirm their individuality to counter contemporary hospital practices that standardise patients according to their illness while ignoring patients’ biographies. I propose that patient narratives in the modern context use the hospital as raw material to construct a temporal framework that substitutes the rhythms of everyday life that illness and the institutional culture of the hospital have interrupted. These narratives adhere to the same basic structure: the entrance scenario is always admission to the hospital; the plot structure is built with the non-medical details of the daily hospital routine. Surrounded by a neoliberal ethos that insists on the autonomy of the self and silenced by the mechanisation of illness, contemporary patients transform hospitals into semiotic engines where patients use their immediate environment to re-engineer new voices of the self. In other words, hospitals are sites where people combat depersonalisation with new biographies.