Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital
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.
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Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital
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.
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Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital

Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital

by César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero
Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital
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Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital

Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital

by César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478023562
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 09/09/2022
Series: Experimental Futures
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 312
File size: 8 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Prologue  xv
Timeline: People, Infrastructures, and Events  xix
Introduction  1
1. The National University Escuela  21
2. Clinical Social Medicine  45
3. Religion and Caring in a Medical Setting  79
4. Hospital Budgets before and after Neoliberalism  103
5. Violence and Resistance  137
6. Remaining amid Destruction  179
7. Learning and Practicing Medicine in a For-Profit System  199
Final Remarks. Medicine as Political Imagination  221
Notes  229
References  261
Index  283

What People are Saying About This

Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice - Charles L. Briggs

“In Health in Ruins, César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero scrutinizes the capitalist takeover of medicine in Colombia through an intimate and sensitive history of the maternity wing of a public teaching hospital. The book promises to inspire struggles to defend people-centered epistemologies of care and imagine alternatives to the domination of medicine by capitalism.”

Anne-Emanuelle Birn

“Health in Ruins traces the searing contradictions between Colombia’s marketizing health care reforms celebrated by mainstream policymakers and financiers, and the realities of neoliberal capitalist decimation and profiteering practices at Bogotá’s beloved and beleaguered maternity hospital. Through a critically sympathetic ethnographic accompaniment of these processes, César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero knits together poignant and gripping stories of social and medical care, innovation, devotion, and long-term resistance among hospital staff and patients during politically fraught times.”

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Social Sciences
Anthropology & Archaeology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology - General & Miscellaneous

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