ABSTRACT
Recognizing that health, especially among pregnant women, is a precarious state in Haiti, the focus of the research was on reproductive health problems and illness conceptions among women. This examination of reproductive illness among Haitian women began, appropriately enough, among refugees in Miami, Haitian women who had fled the social and economic causes of much illness. Research in Haiti consisted of several components, including a short door-to-door survey with women in a selected neighborhood to identify common reproductive complaints. Interviews with women focused on recent episodes of reproductive illness and educed what Early has termed "therapeutic narratives"—that is, participants' commentaries on illness, progression, help-seeking resort, and related life events and social relations. While biomedical physicians are on hand the basic problem, the structure of class domination of productive resources, products, and people, cannot be cured with these medical tools, physician ability or commitment notwithstanding. "Biomedicine as magic," this is a connection not often made in anthropological analyses.
