| Summary/Abstract |
This paper is an ethnographic account of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) based on a study of a public hospital trauma ward in urban India. It explores the contexts, causes and consequences of TBIs in order to make several broader claims. Across two case studies, I argue that epidemiological transitions towards non-infectious disease regimens must be understood as problems of somatic movement. The implication is that bodies make transitions through actual and imagined changes in bodily movements that define how persons become patients, how traumatic injury pulls on clinical resources, and how differences in gender, sexuality, class and caste affect the social dynamics of brain injury in urban settings at every turn.
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