The work of inner-city emergency psychiatric units might best be described as "medicine under siege." Emptying Beds is the result of the author's two-year immersion in one such unit and its work. It is an account of the strategies developed by a staff of psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and other mental health workers to deal with the dilemmas they face every day.

Lorna A. Rhodes is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.

"[A] compelling ethnography of an acute psychiatric unit. . . . A fascinating account that describes how the staff of such a unit managed briefly to treat and then 'place' the often poor and destitute emergency patients."—Bruce Link, Contemporary Sociology

"Rhodes' observations are couched in the theroetical formulations of Michel Foucault. . . . The description of the unit's activities are bloodcurdling and funny and precisely accurate. . . . Emptying Beds is a readable, accurate, and alarming work of anthropology."—Frank S. Pittman III, American Journal of Psychiatry