Suchergebnisse

"The Day I Die is a major work of nonfiction that tackles the one issue we'll all eventually come to face-our final days, hours, and minutes. With clarity and empathy, award-winning anthropologist Anita Hannig uncovers the stigma against the practice of assisted dying, untangles the legalities and logistics of pursuing an assisted death in America today, and profiles the dedicated advocates and medical personnel involved. In intimate, lyrical detail, Hannig explains why someone might choose an assisted death and how that decision impacts their loved ones. In a time when nearly 80 percent of Americans die in hospitals and nursing homes, medical assistance in dying could transform the way we die for the better, allowing more people to define the terms of their own death"--

Kin, society, and religion.A malleable world: injury, care, and belonging --Interlude: Yashume --The pure and the pious: flow, containment, and transgression --Fistula treatment and the institution.Mending the mothers of Ethiopia: institutional roots, logic, and mission --Interlude: poison --Clinical tracks: moving through surgery --Beyond surgery.Healing and reforming: the making of the modern clinical subject --Interlude: conversion --From orphan to apprentice: crafting patient entrepreneurs at Desta Mender.

ABSTRACTAt fistula hospitals in Ethiopia, patients who are not cured of their incontinence are hired as "nurse aides" to perform essential nursing duties in the ward and operating theater. An array of tensions surrounds the work of these women, tensions that are emblematic of their chronic—but secret—patient status. If accidentally disclosed, the women's ongoing illness episodes sabotage their ability to administer treatment, such as injections. In contrast to classic anthropological accounts of wounded healers and therapeutic narratives about the virtues of experience‐based care, I argue in this article that illness experience can also have a profoundly delegitimizing effect. Rather than attributing these dynamics to the alleged stigma that surrounds obstetric fistula sufferers, I delineate the various challenges to clinical authority that are epitomized by the figure of the sick healer. Nurse aides' experiences with obstetric fistula proved to be a liability precisely because these experiences had not been resolved. Their chronic injuries raised questions both about their medical training and the efficacy of surgery. Attending to these Ethiopian health practitioners can hone our grasp of the professional dilemmas posed by chronic afflictions and contribute to our understanding of available ideologies at play in the global practice of biomedicine. [chronic illness, experience, healing, obstetric fistula, Ethiopia]

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One. Global Medicines in Local Cultures -- Chapter 1 Global Health Goals and Local Constraints in a Rural Peruvian Clinic -- Chapter 2 Science and Sanctity: Biomedicine and Christianity at an Ethiopian Hospital -- Chapter 3 The Cosmopolitan Hospital -- Chapter 4 "Dangerous Disease" Epilepsy in Asante -- Chapter 5 The Salience of the State in Biomedicine: Congo and Uganda Cases Compared -- Part Two. Care Giving and Hospital Labor -- Chapter 6 Creating a Therapeutic Community: Lessons from Allada Hospital Benin -- Chapter 7 Medical "Errands" among Women with Cervical Cancer in Guatemala -- Chapter 8 Routinized Caring or a "Call" to Nursing: Shifts in Hospital Nursing in Rukwa, Tanzania -- Chapter 9 "We Work with What We Have, Not with What We Would Like to Have" Hospital Care in Mexico -- Part Three. Hospitals and the Patient -- Chapter 10 The Navigation of Public Hospitals by West African Immigrants with Cancer in Paris, France -- Chapter 11 Each Child Is Unique: The Responsible U.S. Parent's Take on Hospital Care Gone Wrong -- Chapter 12 Making Ethnographic Sense of Cesarean Rates in Greek Public Hospitals -- Chapter 13 The Nightside of Medicine: Obstetric Suffering and Ethnographic Witnessing in a Pakistani Hospital -- Afterword -- References -- Notes on Contributors -- Index