Description: The Work of Hospitals, a volume on hospitals as clinical and social institutions, foregrounds the tensions inherent in efforts to sustain functional health services in resource-poor states. Global ethnographic research shows how clinicians and patients struggle, without adequate supplies and personnel, in times of financial austerity. The chapters document a vast gulf worldwide between the idealized mission of the hospital and the implementation of this mission in everyday practice.
Review Quotes: "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"