The Work of Hospitals

Reviews / Votes

"Drawing on a range of evocative and sometimes shocking examples, The Work of Hospitals showcases the value of comparative, ethnographic research, beautifully asserting the enduring significance of the clinical space as a lens through which to understand society. Hospitals are spaces of refracted power, surveillance, and Othering, but also inevitably of experimentation. Medicine is no finished product to be enacted on passive bodies, but is negotiated and remade continually in relation to patients' own sentiments and worldviews." - Elizabeth Hull (author of Contingent Citizens: Professional Aspiration in a South African Hospital) "Drawing on a range of evocative and sometimes shocking examples, The Work of Hospitals showcases the value of comparative, ethnographic research, beautifully asserting the enduring significance of the clinical space as a lens through which to understand society. Hospitals are spaces of refracted power, surveillance, and Othering, but also inevitably of experimentation. Medicine is no finished product to be enacted on passive bodies, but is negotiated and remade continually in relation to patients' own sentiments and worldviews." - Elizabeth Hull (author of Contingent Citizens: Professional Aspiration in a South African Hospital) "A landmark study of the hospital as a social space caught up in global and neoliberal logics. The book's incisive case studies explore moments of care and canny improvisation in the face of structural neglect. By showing how professionals, patients, and families engage each other on contested hospital landscapes, the book makes an important contribution to the anthropology of medicine, power and care in a global age." - Paul Brodwin (author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry) "A landmark study of the hospital as a social space caught up in global and neoliberal logics. The book's incisive case studies explore moments of care and canny improvisation in the face of structural neglect. By showing how professionals, patients, and families engage each other on contested hospital landscapes, the book makes an important contribution to the anthropology of medicine, power and care in a global age." - Paul Brodwin (author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry) "The wide variety of hospitals and contexts in this collection provides ample material for reflecting on the gaps between the ideals and realities in hospital practice, as well as a rich portrait of the global diversity of health care." (Family Medicine) "The wide variety of hospitals and contexts in this collection provides ample material for reflecting on the gaps between the ideals and realities in hospital practice, as well as a rich portrait of the global diversity of health care." (Family Medicine)