‘You get sick when you go to the hospital!’ Sickening landscapes, digital exclusiveness, and iatrogenesis in rural North China

Abstract

AbstractA local narrative current in North China's Shandong Province paints the hospital as a place where people become ill. This article foregrounds older rural people's embodied experience of navigating the medical system. This involves humiliation and feelings of incompetence in their interactions not only with other people whom they see as more sophisticated than them but also with unfamiliar things such as elevators and digital payment platforms. ‘Sickening landscapes’, a concept built upon this narrative, expands the notion of therapeutic landscapes to bring into sharp relief the negative effects of places and things and the embedded health inequities. It offers a native account of iatrogenesis, as something arising from mundane interactions with physical spaces, technologies, and people, which expands the current focus of clinical iatrogenesis on medical error, malpractices, and nosocomial infections. Incorporating the notion of ‘sickening landscapes’ into the theory of care helps us better attend to the trivial, easily neglected things and places that directly bear on the health and well‐being of marginalized social groups.