In Health in Ruins César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno--Colombia's oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospital--over several decades as it faced constant threats of government shutdown. Using team-based and collaborative ethnography to analyze the social life of neoliberal health policy, Abadía-Barrero details the everyday dynamics around teaching, learning, and working in health care before, during, and after privatization. He argues that health care privatization is not only about defunding public hospitals; it also ruins rich traditions of medical care by denying or destroying ways of practicing medicine that challenge Western medicine. Despite radical cuts in funding and a corrupt and malfunctioning privatized system, El Materno's professors, staff, and students continued to find ways to provide innovative, high-quality, and noncommodified health care. By tracking the violences, conflicts, hopes, and uncertainties that characterized the struggles to keep El Materno open, Abadía-Barrero demonstrates that any study of medical care needs to be embedded in larger political histories.

Formato	Tapa suave
Número de Páginas	312
Lenguaje	Inglés
Editorial	Duke University Press
Fecha de Publicación	2022-10-14
Dimensiones	9.0" x 6.0" x 0.65" pulgadas
Serie	Experimental Futures
Letra Grande	No
Con Ilustraciones	No
Temas	América Latina

César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, author of "I Have AIDS but I Am Happy" Children's Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil, and coeditor of A Companion to Medical Anthropology.