In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Diane Chang, MD, MFA, of Doctors for the 99%, describes the people who do the grinding day-to-day work of caring for the sick.
She was one of those nurses who have a fearlessness and practicality when it comes to wounds, smells, poo, and blood—what we keep scrubbed and hidden from normal society—and you have to admire their matter-of-fact way of getting things done that normalizes the breaking down of the body and human waste.
Interns do scut work, but not for long. It's the home health aides, nursing aides, orderlies, attendants, and janitors who perform this intimate physical care work every day, year after year.
But when people who feed and bathe the elderly and sick, who cook and clean and change beds receive poverty-level wages, we as a society devalue the backbreaking work of taking care of people.
Acts of caring are sacred: feeding the sick and old, cleaning them, and tending to their wounds are in some ways as intimate as you can get with another body. In performing these acts, we bear witness to people naked and infirm, at the beginning of life or at the very end, or at the most vulnerable moments in their lives.
The whole opinion is behind JAMA's firewall, but you can find a pdf on the
website of Doctors for the 99%.