Q: What does medicine mean to you? How does it relate to your projects past or current , and the academic position you hold? A: For me, medicine is most meaningful on a several fronts right now, in light of my current ethnographic research in and around casualty emergency and trauma wards at public hospitals in Mumbai. The first is how medicine works as a differential of narrative. Besides being a different medical science than I was used to in earlier research more on that in bit , trauma medicine is also different in terms of story.
The intensive care unit in trauma adds another layer of complexity; many patients are intubated. This has been both refreshing and unnerving to me, given that the whole idea of a semi-coherent narrative of illness experience is one of the foundations of medical anthropology that I was trained in. Ethically, and sensibly, I did not focus on patient stories when they were in dire straits.
This has shifted how I write about everyday violence and efforts to treat it, in a context where the object of violence β the person who is injured β is no longer a readily available resource of story. But there are stories, still. Thinking from this place is where I might begin to address to your question about translation. I am just as interested in how doctors and nurses and technicians and janitors do the same thing.
This is often an issue of creating a conversation about the patient, around the person, right by their bed, sometimes while they inhale and exhale in synch with a ventilator. You, the anthropologist, hear about a person, sometimes as if she is not there, but in fact she is right there in front of you. It is a space of translation in this way. Translation may be supportive, but it can also be dismissive or directed in unexpected directions: in the anxiety around an event not necessarily the event itself , and at odd angles to the subject of injury not necessarily parallel.
Surgery governs most of what I see in my current project. You, the doctor, are up against hormone concentrations dwindling, unless you add more insulin , and downstream impairments involving vision, blood circulation, and touch sensations, These things take time to figure out.
