BiblioVault - Books by Wendland, Claire

A Heart for the Work

Journeys through an African Medical School

Claire L. Wendland

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Burnout is common among doctors in the West, so one might assume that a medical career in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, would place far greater strain on the idealism that drives many doctors. But, as A Heart for the Work makes clear, Malawian medical students learn to confront poverty creatively, experiencing fatigue and frustration but also joy and commitment on their way to becoming physicians. The first ethnography of medical training in the global South, Claire L. Wendland’s book is a moving and perceptive look at medicine in a world where the transnational movement of people and ideas creates both devastation and possibility.

Wendland, a physician anthropologist, conducted extensive interviews and worked in wards, clinics, and operating theaters alongside the student doctors whose stories she relates. From the relative calm of Malawi’s College of Medicine to the turbulence of training at hospitals with gravely ill patients and dramatically inadequate supplies, staff, and technology, Wendland’s work reveals the way these young doctors engage the contradictions of their circumstances, shedding new light on debates about the effects of medical training, the impact of traditional healing, and the purposes of medicine.

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Partial Stories

Maternal Death from Six Angles

Claire L. Wendland

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A close look at stories of maternal death in Malawi that considers their implications in the broader arena of medical knowledge.

By the early twenty-first century, about one woman in twelve could expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication in Malawi. Specific deaths became object lessons. Explanatory stories circulated through hospitals and villages, proliferating among a range of practitioners: nurse-midwives, traditional birth attendants, doctors, epidemiologists, herbalists. Was biology to blame? Economic underdevelopment? Immoral behavior? Tradition? Were the dead themselves at fault?

In Partial Stories, Claire L. Wendland considers these explanations for maternal death, showing how they reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. Drawing on extended fieldwork, Wendland reveals how efforts to legitimate a single story as the authoritative version can render care more dangerous than it might otherwise be. Historical, biological, technological, ethical, statistical, and political perspectives on death usually circulate in different expert communities and different bodies of literature. Here, Wendland considers them together, illuminating dilemmas of maternity care in contexts of acute change, chronic scarcity, and endemic inequity within Malawi and beyond.

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The Work of Hospitals

Global Medicine in Local Cultures

William C. Olsen

Rutgers University Press, 2022

In the context of neoliberalism and global austerity measures, health care institutions around the world confront numerous challenges in attempting to meet the needs of local populations. Examples from Africa (including, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Congo), Latin America (Peru, Mexico, Guatemala), Western Europe (France, Greece), and the United States illustrate how hospitals play a significant role in the social production of health and disease in the communities where they are. Many low-resource countries have experienced increasing privatization and dysfunction of public sector institutions such as hospitals, and growing withdrawal of funding for non-profit organizations. Underlying the chapters in The Work of Hospitals is a fundamental question: how do hospitals function lacking the medications, equipment and technologies, and personnel normally assumed to be necessary? This collection of ethnographies demonstrates how hospital administrators, clinicians, and other staff in hospitals around the world confront innumerable risks in their commitment to deliver health care, including civil unrest, widespread poverty, endemic and epidemic disease, and supply chain instability. Ultimately, The Work of Hospitals documents a vast gulf between the idealized mission of the hospital and the implementation of this mission in everyday practice. Hospitals thus become “contested space” between policy and practice.

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