At the foot of Table Mountain: paediatric tuberculosis patient experiences in a centralised treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa
The following thesis traces one year of ethnographic research within a contemporary Tuberculosis (TB) treatment facility in Cape Town, South Africa. Brooklyn Chest Hospital (BCH) is considered to be a provincial TB centre of excellence in the Western Cape (Parsons et al 2010) and as such, caters to both adult and paediatric TB patients. While there are other similar facilities in South Africa, BCH specializes in paediatric TB and is the only facility of its kind in the Western Cape Province. Many (but not all) paediatric patients at BCH came from troubled social circumstances. Poverty, violence, substance abuse, and illness featured prominently in their lives. The thesis documents the many entanglements TB presents to patients, their physicians, teachers, and nursing staff in the context of Cape Town. Throughout the thesis, my argument is multi-faceted. Children are configured and classified in different ways: via Biomedicine, children rights and ethics discourse, volunteers working at the hospital, the hospital school space, and through the metaphorical and real burden of time and tedium one experiences within an institutional setting. While focused on children and their experiences, this thesis does not claim to be solely 'childcentred'. Rather, I bring together different perspectives from nurses, doctors, volunteers, family members, and children themselves to re-create the social and material life of a hospital. In doing so, I focus on the category of the child. Configurations- how people make sense of children and their experiences- underlie the process of paediatric patient making. The child is formulated into different categories which are unstable and unsettled. The 'child' appears here in many forms: the child as a biomedical object, a student patient, the child 'in need', and one who is burdened by time.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations