Visions of Care in a Time of Medical Multiplicity

Abstract

Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique (2018) is concerned with the tensions embedded in Mozambique’s health system across governmental institutions, non-governmental organizations, transnational clinicians, local volunteers, and patients with chronic illness. McKay’s ethnography traces the competing visions of care for patients in Mozambique within a health system marked by institutional multiplicity, complicated political legacies, and economic uncertainty. Medicine in the Meantime explores the in-between spaces elicited by the co-existence of public health frameworks and humanitarian medical models, helping critical medical anthropology elucidate the complicated support networks contemporary citizens and patients must navigate.