What holds together conflicting lineages of law and medicine? Is it the history of their encounters? The everyday practices carried out in their name? This paper considers these questions by pursuing contrasting concepts of "dignity" in a West Bengal hospital's palliative care unit, during a fraught period - August 2024 - when doctors and nurses were pulled between protest and medical practice.

Dr. Sarah Pinto is Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair at Tufts University. Since receiving her PhD from Princton University in 2003 her research has considered childbirth, infant mortality, and birth-work in Uttar Pradesh, India, noting the way reproductive health interventions reiterate caste and the marginalization of Dalit women; women's movement through psychiatric care settings in urban north India and the intersections of kinship dissolutions with crisis and care; and histories of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in South Asia as they pertain to women's lives and gendered diagnoses, notably "hysteria" and its avatars.