Health in Ruins
The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital
CĂ©sar Ernesto AbadĂa-Barrero
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Health in Ruins
The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital
CĂ©sar Ernesto AbadĂa-Barrero
Ă propos de ce livre
In Health in Ruins CĂ©sar Ernesto AbadĂa-Barrero chronicles the story of El MaternoâColombia's oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospitalâover 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, AbadĂa-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, AbadĂa-Barrero demonstrates that any study of medical care needs to be embedded in larger political histories.