Rebirth of the Clinic: Places and Agents in Contemporary Health Care (A Quadrant Book) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816670196 ISBN 13: 9780816670192

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2010

Synopsis

From physical location to payment processes to expectations of both patients and caregivers, nearly everything surrounding the contemporary medical clinic's central activity has changed since Michel Foucualt's Birth of the Clinic. Indebted to that work, but recognizing the gap between what the modern clinic hoped to be and what it has become, Rebirth of the Clinic explores medical practices that shed light on the fraught relationship between medical systems, practitioners, and patients.
Combining theory, history, and ethnography, the contributors to this volume ground today's clinic in a larger scheme of power relations, identifying the cultural, political, and economic pressures that frame clinical relationships, including the instrumentalist definition of health, actuarial-based medical practices, and patient self-help movements, which simultaneously hem in and create the conditions under which agents creatively change ideas of illness and treatment.
From threatened community health centers in poor African American locales to innovative nursing practices among the marginally housed citizens of Canada's poorest urban neighborhood, this volume addresses not just the who, what, where, and how of place-specific clinical practices, but also sets these local experiences against a theoretical backdrop that links them to the power of modern medicine in shaping fundamental life experiences.
 Contributors: Christine Ceci, U of Alberta; Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook U; Suzanne Fraser, Monash U; John Liesch, Simon Fraser U; Jenna Loyd, CUNY; Annemarie Mol, U of Amsterdam; Mary Ellen Purkis, U of Victoria.

About this title

About the Author:

Cindy Patton is a professor of women's studies and sociology at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film (Minnesota, 2007) and Globalizing AIDS (Minnesota, 2002).

Review:

"Rebirth of the Clinic contributes significantly and meaningfully to critical, interdisciplinary research on the clinic, on interactions between medical professionals and patients, and on the complex processes of translation through which policies are put into practice and vice versa." —Samantha King, Queens University

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0816670196
• ISBN 13: 9780816670192
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Patton Cindy