The Afterlives of the Clinic: AMR, Conflict, and the Future of Global Health, with Omar Dewachi
Across contemporary conflict zones, the clinic—the central institution of modern medicine—is increasingly fragile. From Gaza’s devastated hospitals to Mosul’s shattered medical infrastructures, war has undone the basic conditions that once sustained clinical practice. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research in the Middle East, this talk explores the afterlives of the clinic: the provisional, improvised, and often fragmented forms of care that emerge when hospitals collapse, laboratories fail, and medical records scatter across borders.
These disrupted conditions also shape patterns of antimicrobial resistance, where shortages, displacement, and repeated interruptions to care leave lasting microbial and therapeutic consequences. As patients move between cities and countries seeking treatment, they carry with them both the scars and complications of systems that can no longer guarantee continuity.
By rethinking global health from these settings, the talk asks what it means to practice and support medicine amid chronic instability—and how humanitarian, clinical, and planetary health frameworks must adapt to a world where care unfolds in ruins.
In preparation for this seminar, Dr. Dewachi has recommended reading I Was a Doctor in Iraq. I Am Seeing a Nightmare Play Out Again.
Speaker Profile
Omar Dewachi is a medical anthropologist, historian, and former physician whose work examines how decades of war and displacement in the Middle East have reshaped medical infrastructures, therapeutic practices, and microbial life. He is Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. His scholarship bridges medical anthropology, global health, humanitarian studies, and the history of science, with publications in The Lancet, Global Public Health, and leading anthropology journals, as well as commentary featured in The New York Times. Dewachi is the author of Ungovernable Life and is completing his forthcoming book, Death of the Clinic, which traces the collapse and afterlives of medicine in conflict settings. His research informs global debates on health, conflict, and the futures of care.
Register below and join us on Wednesday, February 4, at 1:00 p.m. ET
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