Fabien Provost (King’s College London) 

An ethnographic approach to forensic medicine in India

Based on a twelve months of ethnographic investigation in the morgues of North Indian hospitals and on an exploration of judicial archives, my book Les mots de la morgue (éditions Mimésis, 2021) explores the daily practice of forensic medicine. By describing the encounters between doctors, police officers and families, medico-legal examinations and the work involved in writing reports, I develop an anthropological approach to the relationship between medicine and law. What happens to a medical practice when it serves a legal purpose? How do writing strategies enable doctors to redefine their role in the legal process? My analyzes reveal the logics of anticipation, the forms of knowledge and the professional tensions at the core of the production of medico-legal evidence.

Fabien Provost is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King's College London. He is a member of the Wellcome-funded project Grid Oncology: Remaking Cancer Care in India. Among other publications, Fabien is the coeditor of the book Hospitals in South Asia: Health Policies, Care Practices (Éditions de l’EHESS, Purushartha collection, 2019).