Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma
Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma
by Harris Solomon
Duke University Press, 2022
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-1621-2
Paper: 978-1-4780-1885-8
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9272-8 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-2348-7 (standard)
About the Book
In Lifelines Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, and families who experience and care for traumatic injuries due to widespread traffic accidents. He traces trauma’s moves after the accident: from scenes of road and railway injuries to ambulance interiors; through emergency triage, surgery, and intensive care; and from the morgue for patients who do not survive into the homes of those who do. These pathways reveal how trauma shifts inequalities, infrastructures, and institutions through the lives and labors of clinical spaces. Solomon contends that medicine itself must be understood in terms of lifelines: patterns of embodied movement that determine survival. In reflecting on the centrality of traffic to life, Lifelines explores a fundamental question: How does medicine move us?
About the Author
Harris Solomon is Fred W. Shaffer Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University and author of Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
-- Waqas Butt South Asia
"Lifelines is a subtly crafted account of the tangled relations between mobility and life in the contemporary city. In that sense, it contributes to a vibrant discussion on mobility, infrastructure and urban life across South Asia and other regions of the world today. . . . The manuscript’s strengths lie in how it radiates out from its empirical focus: trauma as it moves in and through the hospital as a site of medicalised care."
-- Waqas Butt South Asia
"The book is extremely detailed and top-notch in terms of ethnographic methods."
-- Rana Abhyendra Singh IIAS Review
-- Rana Abhyendra Singh IIAS Review
"[T]his is a stupendous work of medical anthropology, providing a new lens through which to view traffic-related trauma and associated movements, with specific reference to a major city of the Global South. It brilliantly captures injury’s relational kinetics after the accident, explained with plenty of examples and theoretical dialogue."
-- Saurav K. Rai H-Asia
-- Saurav K. Rai H-Asia
Tags
Mumbai, Traffic, Emergency medical services, Traffic accident victims, Lifelines, India, South, Asia, Cultural & Social, Anthropology, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
Label: Duke University
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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