Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia: From Traditional Healers to Pharmaceutical Companies

(Hardback)

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Based on Pino Schirripas fieldwork, Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia traces the development of pharmaceutical products and medical remedies in the health sector. Schirripa analyzes the production and distribution of medications and examines how local politics, financial resources, social relations, and neoliberal beliefs can make some treatments more widespread and accepted than others. Schirripas observations of Ethiopian healing systems and social relations provide new insight into the complex process of prescription.

Reviews

Refusing the great divide between traditional medicine and biomedicine, Pino Schirippa takes us into the fascinating world of medicines, both herbal and synthetic, in Ethiopia. Through this incursion into a plural medical universe, where various therapeutic traditions compete, he skillfully initiates a stimulating reflection on the issue of inequalities in access to care. -- Sylvie Fainzang, National Institute of Health and Medical Research - France
Pino Schirripa presents the reader with an amazingly comprehensive ethnography of the ways in which both traditional and synthetic medicines are produced, distributed, prescribed, and used in Ethiopia, unraveling the historical processes, knowledge systems, and power relations that shape these practices. Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia builds on decades of engagement with these issues in Ethiopia offering the reader the best of what long-term fieldwork has to offer. -- Anita Hardon, University of Amsterdam

Author Bio

Pino Schirippa is associate professor at Sapienza University of Rome.