Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is the story of peoples struggle to make biomedicine work in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea. It is a story encompassing the history of hospital infrastructures as sites of colonial and postcolonial governance the simultaneous production of Papua New Guinea as a site of global medical research and public health and peoples encounters with urban institutions and biomedical technologies. In Papua New Guinea a century of state building has weakened already inadequate colonial infrastructures and people experience the hospital as a space of institutional medical and ontological instability.In the hospitals clinics biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze.