Health in Ruins

“In Health in Ruins, César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero scrutinizes the capitalist takeover of medicine in Colombia through an intimate and sensitive history of the maternity wing of a public teaching hospital. The book promises to inspire struggles to defend people-centered epistemologies of care and imagine alternatives to the domination of medicine by capitalism.” - Charles L. Briggs, coauthor of Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice

“Health in Ruins traces the searing contradictions between Colombia’s marketizing health care reforms celebrated by mainstream policymakers and financiers, and the realities of neoliberal capitalist decimation and profiteering practices at Bogotá’s beloved and beleaguered maternity hospital. Through a critically sympathetic ethnographic accompaniment of these processes, César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero knits together poignant and gripping stories of social and medical care, innovation, devotion, and long-term resistance among hospital staff and patients during politically fraught times.” - Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Professor of Critical Development Studies and Global Health, University of Toronto

“This superb, timely monograph . . . is both collaborative and activist. . . . Abadía-Barrero’s decade of intense fieldwork along with his local knowledge has enabled him to produce a vivid, astutely rendered ethnography.” - Carole Browner, H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews

"This book calls on us to fight for health care that no longer leaves so many people in the public hospital waiting area, condemned to a precarious survival, while offering treatment in private hospitals to those who can pay. ... Health in Ruins makes a fundamental contribution to current scholarly debates on the embodiment of social inequalities brought about by capitalist ideology."