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Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
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About Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward In
Product 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. Review “ Improvising Medicine is a luminous book by a highly respected Africanist whose work creatively bridges anthropology and history. A product of intense listening and observation, deep care, and superb analytical work, it will become a canonical ethnography of medicine in the global south and will have a big impact across the social sciences and medical humanities.”— João Biehl, author of Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival and Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment " Improvising Medicine is as good as it gets. It is a book that will be read for decades to come. I have always thought that great ethnography transcends the specificities of time and place, of the particular, to offer a glimpse of the universal. This gripping book does just that, and the subtle and grounded way that it speaks to global health and debates in medical anthropology makes it a major addition to both fields."— Vinh-Kim Nguyen, M.D., author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS “This book will find a ready readership among Africanists and medical anthropologists. I envision its wider use in g'lobal health' courses, where it will challenge aspiring health workers accustomed to locating hope for medical development in scalable technical interventions... Cancer care, Livingston shows us—like medicine, like development—often requires starting over, usually entails improvisation, and always calls for hard labor by particular individuals in the face of destructive political and economic forces. Improvising Medicine reminds us effectively, sometimes devastatingly, how intractably human this thing called 'health care' is.” -- Claire Wendland ― American Ethnologist “This is an excellent ethnography that should (and undoubtedly will) be read and taught by anthropologists, historians, science studies scholars, and interdisciplinary scholars of Africa…. students and practitioners of global health should be reading Improvising Medicine, in which African cancer is made visible and the clinical science of oncology is never divorced from the moral labor and political conditions of care.” -- Johanna Crane ― African Studies Review “ Improvising Medicine is best suited to those who are interested in global health or who provide medical care across cultures. While its primary subject is cancer, the points the author makes regarding the view of medical care priorities in resource-poor countries, as well as the culture-dependent experience of disease, are well taken and can be applied to work in other areas of the world.” -- Holly Salzman ― Family Medicine “In Improvising Medicine, Julie Livingston presents a vivid ethnography
