Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma

Lifelines is an ethnographic study of road and railway injuries and of trauma surgery. Its aim is to understand injury and movement as problems that must be thought together, and argues that medicine itself must be understood in terms of movements. It is based on five years of ethnographic research on traffic accidents in Mumbai, primarily in the trauma ward of one of the city's largest public hospitals. Lifelines tracks traumatic injury as the accident moves through different domains: the conveyance of accidents to the hospital, triage, surgery, the involvement of families and police, intensive care, autopsy, and recovery with disability after discharge. The research for Lifelines was supported by a CAREER Award (Faculty Early Career Development Program) from the National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology Program.