Harris Solomon - Glitch Medicine and the Anthropology of Error

Lecture abstract

Glitch Medicine and the Anthropology of Error
This talk examines the fraught connections between error, harm, and medicine in India. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork about medical errors and healthcare cyberattacks as they subtend uneven processes of hospital privatization and public health digitization. Healthcare workers must increasingly navigate the specters and the actualities of iatrogenesis, or the harm that medicine may cause. At stake, I argue, is what I call "glitch medicine": a transformation in the very nature and function of medicine characterized by intensified proximities to danger and quests for safety.

About the lecturer

Harris Solomon is an anthropologist of medicine, science, and health who studies the dynamic relations between medicine and everyday social and political life. Trained in both anthropology and public health, he has conducted field research in urban India and in the US. He is the author of Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India (Duke University Press, 2016), which received the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology; and Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma (Duke University Press, 2022).

He is currently the Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and holds appointments in The Duke Global Health Institute; the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine at the Duke School of Medicine. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, Wenner-Gren, and Fulbright-Hays. In 2025-2026, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is currently at work on a project about errors in medicine.