Care arrangements with multiple rationales in a pediatric hemato-oncology service in Cameroon

Hospital treatment for childhood cancers is not only costly but it is also not readily accessible for health systems and patients in most developing countries, including Cameroon. A hospital ethnographic study in a pediatric hemato-oncology service in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, permitted us to show how varying logics with regards to different therapeutic models come together and give meaning to the care provided. Beyond questions related to curative or palliative care experience and death, pediatric oncology constitutes a particular institutional, medical, and technical arrangement where the "apolitical" and "political" are intertwined. With an opening from the strictly clinical toward the social, medicality finds its legitimacy reinforced, manifested by the contributions of religious aspects as well as popular ideas concerning healthcare for infantile cancer.