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Based on an ethnographic research carried out in the turn of the 2000s at the technical services department of now Parisian hospitals which have been shut down since, the article reviews the workers’ experiences of the “galleries” i.e. the basements that connected the hospital different buildings, thus hosting the technical networks and workshops. This underworld, of rats, darkness and squalor, was the workers’ world; different from the one above, the world of the “white coats”, of healthcare and hygiene. The result was a situation of social and spatial ostracism for its staff, from which they longed to free themselves.