Biomedicine in an unstable place : infrastructure and personhood in a Papua New Guinean hospital
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Biomedicine in an unstable place : infrastructure and personhood in a Papua New Guinean hospital
(Experimental futures : technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices)
Duke University Press, 2014
- : pbk
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [261]-280) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is the story of people's struggle to make biomedicine work in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea. It is a story encompassing the history of hospital infrastructures as sites of colonial and postcolonial governance, the simultaneous production of Papua New Guinea as a site of global medical research and public health, and people's encounters with urban institutions and biomedical technologies. In Papua New Guinea, a century of state building has weakened already inadequate colonial infrastructures, and people experience the hospital as a space of institutional, medical, and ontological instability.
In the hospital's clinics, biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze. That struggle is entangled with attempts by doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to external others-to kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers-as socially recognizable and valuable persons. Here hospital infrastructures emerge as relational technologies that are fundamentally fragile but also offer crucial opportunities for making people visible and knowable in new, unpredictable, and powerful ways.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Prologue 1 Part I. Place 1. Making a Place for Biomedicine 11 2. Locating Disease 39 3. Public Buildings, Building Publics 59 Part II. Technology 4. Doctors without Diagnosis 89 5. The Waiting Place 115 6. Technologies of Detachment 143 Part III. Infrastructure 7. The Partnership Hospital 169 8. Research in the Clinic 194 Conclusion: Biomedicine in a Fragile State 223 Notes 237 Bibliography 261 Index 281
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