Claire L. Wendland's Books

Partial Stories

Maternal Death from Six Angles

By: Claire L. Wendland

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Partial Stories

Maternal Death from Six Angles

By: Claire L. Wendland

Partial Stories takes readers to Malawi, where roughly one in twenty women can expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication, despite decades of safe-motherhood programs. The stories of these mothers are told in hospitals and villages, by chiefs and doctors, herbalists and nurses, epidemiologists and healers, and competing explanations proliferate. The mothers' stories are used by elders for technical education and moral instruction at a coming-of-age-ritual, a district hospital's mortality review, and in the reflected glow of a computer screen at an international conference. After orienting readers to urban Malawi's context of therapeutic pluralism and material scarcity, Claire Wendland discusses the ways various experts account for maternal death, showing how their diverse explanations reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. She looks to a series of pregnancy-related deaths in order to consider bodies as biosocial phenomena, shaped from before birth by history and social inequality. Wendland reveals an uneven therapeutic landscape that pushes experts to improvise, clinically and ethically. Their creative, essential, and sometimes deadly improvisations ask us to reconsider the "best practice" dogmas of global health and transnational research, as well as the nature of medical authority and expertise. Wendland demonstrates how strategies of legitimation render care more dangerous and knowledge more partial than it might otherwise be"--

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Page Count

365

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226816885

ISBN 13

9780226816883

A Heart for the Work

Journeys Through an African Medical School

By: Claire L. Wendland

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A Heart for the Work

Journeys Through an African Medical School

By: Claire L. Wendland

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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Page Count

346

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226893278

ISBN 13

9780226893273

A Heart for the Work

Journeys Through an African Medical School

By: Claire L. Wendland

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A Heart for the Work

Journeys Through an African Medical School

By: Claire L. Wendland

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

346

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226893278

ISBN 13

9780226893273

Partial Stories

Maternal Death from Six Angles

By: Claire L. Wendland

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Partial Stories

Maternal Death from Six Angles

By: Claire L. Wendland

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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Page Count

365

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226816877

ISBN 13

9780226816876

Book's by Claire L. Wendland

Partial Stories

Partial Stories

A Heart for the Work

A Heart for the Work

A Heart for the Work

A Heart for the Work

Partial Stories

Partial Stories

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