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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.

Physicians and Hospitals addresses an issue of concern and one of fundamental importance to the American health care system. While the ranks of physicians continue to swell and hospitals continue to expand their facilities, federal, state, and local governments remain determined to control health care expenditures. As a result, checks on the supply of services and facilities have been implemented that strain the physician-hospital relationship, often placing physicians and hospital administrations in conflict. The implications for American health care are the subject of disagreement and vigorous debate.