The Work of Hospitals
Global Medicine in Local Cultures
William C Olsen author Carolyn Sargent author William C Olsen editor Carolyn Sargent editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Rutgers University Press
Published:18th Mar '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£124.00(9781978823044)
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.
"Drawing on a range of evocative and sometimes shocking examples, The Work of Hospitals showcases the value of comparative, ethnographic research, beautifully asserting the enduring significance of the clinical space as a lens through which to understand society. Hospitals are spaces of refracted power, surveillance, and Othering, but also inevitably of experimentation. Medicine is no finished product to be enacted on passive bodies, but is negotiated and remade continually in relation to patients’ own sentiments and worldviews." -- Elizabeth Hull * author of Contingent Citizens: Professional Aspiration in a South African Hospital *
"A landmark study of the hospital as a social space caught up in global and neoliberal logics. The book's incisive case studies explore moments of care and canny improvisation in the face of structural neglect. By showing how professionals, patients, and families engage each other on contested hospital landscapes, the book makes an important contribution to the anthropology of medicine, power and care in a global age." -- Paul Brodwin * author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry *
"Drawing on a range of evocative and sometimes shocking examples, The Work of Hospitals showcases the value of comparative, ethnographic research, beautifully asserting the enduring significance of the clinical space as a lens through which to understand society. Hospitals are spaces of refracted power, surveillance, and Othering, but also inevitably of experimentation. Medicine is no finished product to be enacted on passive bodies, but is negotiated and remade continually in relation to patients’ own sentiments and worldviews." -- Elizabeth Hull * author of Contingent Citizens: Professional Aspiration in a South African Hospital *
"A landmark study of the hospital as a social space caught up in global and neoliberal logics. The book's incisive case studies explore moments of care and canny improvisation in the face of structural neglect. By showing how professionals, patients, and families engage each other on contested hospital landscapes, the book makes an important contribution to the anthropology of medicine, power and care in a global age." -- Paul Brodwin * author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry *
"The wide variety of hospitals and contexts in this collection provides ample material for reflecting on the gaps between the ideals and realities in hospital practice, as well as a rich portrait of the global diversity of health care." * Family Medicine *
ISBN: 9781978823037
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 14mm
Weight: 4g
270 pages