Health in Ruins

In <i>Health in Ruins</i> César Ernesto Abadía-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 Abadía-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 Abadía-Barrero demonstrates that any study of medical care needs to be embedded in larger political histories.