Book ID: CBB001420179

Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (2012)

unapi

Livingston, Julie (Author)


Duke University Press


Publication Date: 2012
Physical Details: 248 pp.; ill.; maps; bibl.; index
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Brada, Betsey (2014) Review of "Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 218-219). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001420179/

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Authors & Contributors
Djordjevic, Darja
Sarah F. Liebschutz
Guian A. McKee
Stevens, Rosemary A.
Otter, Christopher J.
Newton, Gill
Concepts
Public health
Health care
Medicine and government
Hospitals and clinics
Epidemics
Medicine and economics
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
18th century
20th century
19th century
Places
United States
Botswana
Africa
Rwanda
Myanmar (Burma)
London (England)
Institutions
Johns Hopkins Hospital
American Medical Association
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