Abstract
The author from an anthropological research conducted in a hospital in Marseille shows how the day hospital that welcomes people with the AIDS virus (1989/1991) is a daily space for these patients, how is the relationships inside the hospital and with the caregivers and how are lived the daily difficulties outside.The field data make it possible to highlight, in the patients, the existence of a duality in the representation of the hospital. The hospital is perceived and lived as a place of welcome, and indeed a haven of tolerance. But this perception is dependent on the vision and the representations that patients have of society and its tolerance vis-à-vis the affected people. Place of reception offered to the sick from the first time of the epidemic, the hospital is the place where one can evoke the disease, its symptoms, its problems, to receive care, a listening etc ... It is the place where one can circulate "openly". It is a space that is considered closed. What goes on inside, the people who are busy, the people who come there, all this is circumscribed in this space by walls that constitute borders. Despite this sense of protection the experience of infection in the day hospital remains painful, difficult, even stigmatizing by the relationship to others it causes regularly. This conception of the hospital as an hermetic "bubble" within a larger space of society and the world of uncontaminated people indeed implies, and often unconsciously, to conceive of the hospital also as a place of clandestinity and public organization of the care of patients in "specialized" units as a form of rejection by society, knowingly orchestrated from institutions and public policies.This work was the subject of a thesis entitled: Vernazza-Licht, 1994, The Reforming Patient ? Attitudes and strategies of patients facing AIDS care institutions, University of Grenoble.