Book excerpt: Provides eyewitness accounts and personal stories demonstrating how nurses turn the awesome into the routine. Chambliss shows how patients-- many weak and helpless--too often become objects of the bureaucratic machinery of the health care system, and how ethics decisions--once the dilemmas of troubled individuals--become the setting for political turf battles between occupational interest groups. The result is a combination of realism with a theoretical argument about moral life in large organizations. --From publisher description.