When the field is a ward or a clinic: Hospital ethnography.

[To the sick person and] to the family of the sick patient, the hospital is a battlefield between life and death, the focus of intensive anxieties and hopes. To the physician, the hospital is an institution for the practice of medicine and a central agency through which the study of disease is pursued, the boundaries of medical science widened, and medical skill increased. From the standpoint of the businessman and taxpayer, the hospital represents a financial enterprise. (Coser 1962, 3)