Main description:

In Health in Ruins Cesar Ernesto Abadia-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, Abadia-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, Abadia-Barrero demonstrates that any study of medical care needs to be embedded in larger political histories.

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