Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania

by Adrienne Strong

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Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.

Genres: Read For School, Sociology

270 pages, Paperback

Published October 27, 2020

Reviews

[Kristen Herlosky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful perspective on the MMR crisis and the growing dominance of biomedicine and biobureaucracy. The author’s reflexive perspective and her attention to the nurses and health care professionals is a necessary approach to understanding how to better treat the maternal health crisis. I particularly enjoyed the short epilogue and its attention to the US... lots of food for thought throughout. A necessary read for any maternal health researcher.

[Marina Hernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for ANYONE interested in international/global health, public health, and gender. Very easy to read, written for audiences from any academic or educational background, and incredibly necessary discussions.

[Sabrina]

read for anthro class