Biomedicine in an unstable place

In the prologue to her monograph, Biomedicine in an Unstable Place, Alice Street shares the story of William Gambe. This opening expertly foreshadows the rest of the book: as William becomes increasingly unwell, we see the interplay of kinship tensions and sickness, resource shortages and diagnostic uncertainty, and a pervasive concern about feeling invisible. Street’s ethnography is based in Madang Hospital, Papua New Guinea, and is based on fieldwork spanning ten years. The book is an excellent contribution to the canon of hospital ethnographies, and its place-based approach illuminates grounds on which multiple worlds collide. Madang Hospital sees constant frictions between medical practice and scientific research, kin and professional relationships, state-making projects and colonial histories. Despite this capacious subject matter, this work feels cohesive and makes clear contributions to existing theoretical, ethnographic, and political conversations.