Main description:

In Improvising Medicine, Julie Livingston tells the story of Botswana's only dedicated cancer ward, located in its capital city of Gaborone. This affecting ethnography follows patients, their relatives, and ward staff as a cancer epidemic emerged in Botswana. The epidemic is part of an ongoing surge in cancers across the global south; the stories of Botswana's oncology ward dramatize the human stakes and intellectual and institutional challenges of an epidemic that will shape the future of global health. They convey the contingencies of high-tech medicine in a hospital where vital machines are often broken, drugs go in and out of stock, and bed-space is always at a premium. They also reveal cancer as something that happens between people. Serious illness, care, pain, disfigurement, and even death emerge as deeply social experiences. Livingston describes the cancer ward in terms of the bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality, and hope that shape contemporary experience in southern Africa. Her ethnography is a profound reflection on the social orchestration of hope and futility in an African hospital, the politics and economics of healthcare in Africa, and palliation and disfigurement across the global south.

Contents:

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

1. The Other Cancer Ward 1

2. Neoplastic Africa: Mapping Circuits of Toxicity and Knowledge 29

3. Creating and Embedding Cancer in Botswana's Oncology Ward 52

Interlude. Amputation Day at Princess Marina Hospital 85

4. The Moral Intimacies of Care 93

5. Pain and Laughter 119

6. After ARVs, During Cancer, Before Death 152

Epilogue. Changing Wards, Further Improvisations 174

Notes 183

Bibliography 205

Index 221