The work of hospitals : global medicine in local cultures / edited by William C. Olsen and Carolyn Sargent.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Olsen, William C., editor.

Sargent, Carolyn F., 1947- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

World health.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (271 pages)

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022]

Summary:

In the context of neoliberalism and global austerity measures, health care institutions around the world confront numerous challenges in attempting to meet the needs of local populations. Examples from Africa (including, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Congo), Latin America (Peru, Mexico, Guatemala), Western Europe (France, Greece), and the United States illustrate how hospitals play a significant role in the social production of health and disease in the communities where they are. Many low-resource countries have experienced increasing privatization and dysfunction of public sector institutions such as hospitals, and growing withdrawal of funding for non-profit organizations. Underlying the chapters in The Work of Hospitals is a fundamental question: how do hospitals function lacking the medications, equipment and technologies, and personnel normally assumed to be necessary? This collection of ethnographies demonstrates how hospital administrators, clinicians, and other staff in hospitals around the world confront innumerable risks in their commitment to deliver health care, including civil unrest, widespread poverty, endemic and epidemic disease, and supply chain instability. Ultimately, The Work of Hospitals documents a vast gulf between the idealized mission of the hospital and the implementation of this mission in everyday practice. Hospitals thus become “contested space” between policy and practice.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Part One. Global Medicines in Local Cultures

Chapter 1 Global Health Goals and Local Constraints in a Rural Peruvian Clinic

Chapter 2 Science and Sanctity: Biomedicine and Christianity at an Ethiopian Hospital

Chapter 3 The Cosmopolitan Hospital

Chapter 4 “Dangerous Disease” Epilepsy in Asante

Chapter 5 The Salience of the State in Biomedicine: Congo and Uganda Cases Compared

Part Two. Care Giving and Hospital Labor

Chapter 6 Creating a Therapeutic Community: Lessons from Allada Hospital Benin

Chapter 7 Medical “Errands” among Women with Cervical Cancer in Guatemala

Chapter 8 Routinized Caring or a “Call” to Nursing: Shifts in Hospital Nursing in Rukwa, Tanzania

Chapter 9 “We Work with What We Have, Not with What We Would Like to Have” Hospital Care in Mexico

Part Three. Hospitals and the Patient

Chapter 10 The Navigation of Public Hospitals by West African Immigrants with Cancer in Paris, France

Chapter 11 Each Child Is Unique: The Responsible U.S. Parent’s Take on Hospital Care Gone Wrong

Chapter 12 Making Ethnographic Sense of Cesarean Rates in Greek Public Hospitals

Chapter 13 The Nightside of Medicine: Obstetric Suffering and Ethnographic Witnessing in a Pakistani Hospital

Afterword

References

Notes on Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-9788-2305-3

1-9788-2307-X

OCLC:

1294143882