UCLA

This dissertation research explores the multiple configurations of violence—structural, direct physical, surgical—that form both the targets of practice in trauma surgery and, at times, its instantiation. Medicalization is often used by medical anthropologists to index the individualizing, pathologizing, and depoliticizing effects of medical approaches to social problems. But medicalization is likewise recognized as an important way to facilitate new forms of recognition and distributions of care. Medical care is a crucial and indisputable necessity for remedying the physical effects of violence, structural or otherwise, but institutions and providers of medicine are not morally uncomplicated distributors of healing but rather engender their own forms of violence. These entanglements complicate calls for increased care as solutions to seemingly ever-rising tide of criminalization and motivate the central question of this research—what is accomplished when public hospitals are deployed as tools to intervene on violence? How do connections between public hospitals and state violence constrain care in this context, and what would it take to meaningfully disentangle them? This dissertation project explores the work of trauma surgery, hospital violence intervention, and police in the management of violently injured patients in a Los Angeles County public hospital. Through extended ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and participant observation, I ask how surgeons’ experiences of violence shape their embodied understanding of the “conditions of possibility” for how they might intervene in it (Aretxaga 1997, 8). I follow Wendland (2010), who argues that these ideologies of dehumanization and moral categorization are not inevitable features of clinical practice but rather culturally specific and structured by clinicians’ broader conceptualizations of the social responsibility of medicine and the state. This project examines the violence embedded in clinical training and practice as a function of broader structural priorities that remain unchallenged as well as the opportunities for change, contestation and transformation that emerge through our embodied participation in them.