Watching you wear out: Time as clinical labor

Drawing on clinical fieldwork in NHS general practice in East London, I consider the relationship between time, chronic illness, and therapeutic endeavor. Over the course of three treatment narratives, I attempt to show the negative labor that I claim is implied when clinical time is used to watch and wait as somebody is "wearing out" from chronic conditions. This may be the only form of care available to clinicians in situations where medicine is limited in what it can do to intervene. It emerges in response to illnesses that must be allowed to run their course and recurring symptoms that must somehow be tolerated, tarried with, or "waited out." The aim of the paper is to try to engage the grey area between medical intervention and non-intervention, where time in the clinic is offered in the service of helping people to wear out on their own terms.