Shifting Gears: Triage and Traffic in Urban India.
Abstract
While studies of triage in clinical medical literature tend to focus on the knowledge
required to carry out sorting, this article details the spatial features of triage.
It is based on participation observation of traffic-related injuries in a Mumbai hospital
casualty ward. It pays close attention to movement, specifically to adjustments, which
include moving bodies, changes in treatment priority, and interruptions in care. The
article draws on several ethnographic cases of injury and its aftermath that gather
and separate patients, kin, and bystanders, all while a triage medical authority is
charged with sorting them out. I argue that attention must be paid to differences
in movement, which can be overlooked if medical decision-making is taken to be a static
verdict. The explanatory significance of this distinction between adjustment and adjudication
is a more nuanced understanding of triage as an iterative, spatial process.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17223Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1111/maq.12367Publication Info
Solomon, Harris (2017). Shifting Gears: Triage and Traffic in Urban India. Medical anthropology quarterly, 31(3). pp. 349-364. 10.1111/maq.12367. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17223.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Harris Scott Solomon
Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology
I am an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health. My research
explores connections between the body and its environments in urban India.
My first book is entitled Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness
in India (Duke University Press, May 2016, read introduction <a href="htt

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