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  • Field notes
  • Nancy Berlinger, Deputy Director and Associate for Religious Studies

Far afield.

Sometimes I think I missed my calling. While my academic training is in the humanities, I like to hang out with sociologists. I did my doctoral research in "Sp. Coll."—special collections. They did theirs in "the field." While "Sp. Coll." had its thrills—sixteenth and seventeenth century emblem books, in particular—it's not quite the thrill of "the field."

And yet, one Friday last February, there I was, venturing out into the field, courtesy of the Acela service to Boston. I'd persuaded two sociologists—Ray de Vries, a sociologist of medicine, and Wendy Cadge, a sociologist of religion—to meet me at Brandeis, where Wendy teaches, and let me observe them talking about hospital chaplains. Wendy studies chaplains in the field. Ray and I were working on a Hastings Center project, funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, that has been looking at chaplains, a health care profession that is in the process of "professionalizing." Our project has its own empirical component. A team led by George Fitchett at Rush University Medical Center conducted focus groups with chaplains in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Phoenix, asking them to describe how they defined "quality" with respect to their own professional practice, how "QI" was defined and conducted in their institutions, and whether there seemed to be any correlation between how they defined good work and how their institutions sought to measure it. While Ray, Wendy, and George had been in methodological conversation during our project, this was my chance to listen in.

Our participant observer methodology at Brandeis was quite informal. Wendy lent me her digital recorder when my analog one failed to work. And it was a three-way conversation, although it was rewarding for me just to listen to Ray and Wendy describe what the culture of chaplaincy—its values, its language, its rituals, its ways of interacting with other cultures in health care and in religion—looked like from their shared discipline. In the hotel that night, after a sixteen-hour day, I thought, "How am I ever going to write all this up?" I felt the despair of a true field researcher, and resolved not to look at my notes just yet.

On the train back to New York, I finished The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson's enthralling account of the cholera epidemic in London's Soho neighborhood in 1854, and how it led to now-standard public health measures: epidemiological mapping, the identification of a "patient zero" from whom subsequent cases could be traced, and systems to keep drinking water free of contaminants. I learned that John Snow—a physician who suspected that the "miasma" theory of contagion was nonsense, and that water, not odor, was cholera's transmission route—drew the "ghost map" of the title showing cholera cases in relation to neighborhood water pumps. And I learned that one Henry Whitehead was Snow's research collaborator. Whitehead was no scientist—he was an assistant curate in a local church. Once persuaded that the miasma theory was wrong, he took it upon himself to canvass his neighborhood. He found his parishioners were a culture of water-drinkers who, in many cases, lived directly above cesspools. It was Whitehead who found the index case: a baby whose contaminated diapers had been rinsed in water that had seeped into the neighborhood's "pure" well. Mystery solved, by a chaplain in the field. [End Page c2]

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