In Health in Ruins César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno—Colombia’s oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospital—over several decades as it faced constant threats of government shutdown. Using team-based and collaborative ethnography to analyze the social life of neoliberal health policy, Abadía-Barrero details the everyday dynamics around teaching, learning, and working in health care before, during, and after privatization. He argues that health care privatization is not only about defunding public hospitals; it also ruins rich traditions of medical care by denying or destroying ways of practicing medicine that challenge Western medicine. Despite radical cuts in funding and a corrupt and malfunctioning privatized system, El Materno’s professors, staff, and students continued to find ways to provide innovative, high-quality, and noncommodified health care. By tracking the violences, conflicts, hopes, and uncertainties that characterized the struggles to keep El Materno open, Abadía-Barrero demonstrates that any study of medical care needs to be embedded in larger political histories.

"“This superb, timely monograph . . . is both collaborative and activist. . . . Abadía-Barrero’s decade of intense fieldwork along with his local knowledge has enabled him to produce a vivid, astutely rendered ethnography.”" - H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews

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"This book calls on us to fight for health care that no longer leaves so many people in the public hospital waiting area, condemned to a precarious survival, while offering treatment in private hospitals to those who can pay. ... Health in Ruins makes a fundamental contribution to current scholarly debates on the embodiment of social inequalities brought about by capitalist ideology."