Active patients: The integration of modern and traditional obstetric practices in Nepal

Abstract

This paper describes the integration of modern and traditional obstetric practices in a provincial hospital in the Maithili-speaking area of southern Nepal. The doctors and nurses consciously distance themselves from the traditional practices of their obstetrical patients, whom they view as ‘ignorant’; but because hospital resources are insufficient to impose the normative form of modern medical organization, patients and their relatives assert a more active role in providing hospital-based care. In consequence, mothers are delivered according to both modern, clinical as well as local cultural practices. Recent WHO policy has cast modern medicine as the agent in the integration of traditional healing within national health systems. This essay shows that in poor countries the powers of agency may not be exclusively in the hands of the medical profession. Patients, and others in their social networks, have become agents, constraining and negotiating the terms on which modern medicine is to be integrated within their traditional obstetric practices.