Medical practices: ethnography of a reference center in the hospital treatment of Tuberculosis

• Grant number: 15/10186-0
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): August 01, 2015
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal researcher: Anna Catarina Morawska Vianna
• Grantee: Juliana Ramos Boldrin
• Home Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project proposes to analyze medical practices related to the treatment of patients with tuberculosis in hospitalization. The aim is to describe the ways in which these practices make the disease appear, i. e., how the existence of tuberculosis emerges from practices that link bacillus, symptoms and healing through various kinds of knowledge and actors. From field research conducted in referral center Nestor Goulart Reis, of the State Hospital Américo Brasiliense, located in the city of Américo Brasiliense - SP, it seeks to produce an ethnography of practices of health workers. More specifically, we intend to investigate: a) what procedures and professionals involved in the treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis; b) knowledge and technologies deployed by each professional - social workers, nurses, laboratory technicians, doctors - in the identification and treatment of tuberculosis. This project, in dialogue with the medical anthropology literature, seeks to contribute to the methodological debates and discussions related to the practice of compulsory hospitalization in the health field, in view of the dilemmas it causes. As part of efforts of the trials Ethnographic Laboratory (LE-E) linked to the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) UFSCar, this research proposes an ethnographic description of the performance of practices carried out in the treatment and therefore the actors and knowledge involved in them in order to show how the range of information produced in the various places where the disease appears are linked coherently in an established diagnosis.