A Different Position: Protest Medicine and the Limits of Professional Neutrality

Sociol Health Illn. 2026 Jul;48(6):e70243. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.70243.

ABSTRACT

Protests are a persistent feature of contemporary urban life, often producing mass injuries through police repression. Yet the role of medical care in these contexts-especially when provided by informal collectives-remains understudied. Drawing on 21 in-depth interviews with members of volunteer medical brigades during Chile’s 2019-2020 Estallido Social, this paper examines how care was improvised, coordinated and transformed under conditions of sustained police violence, where more than 3500 people were wounded and 36 died. The analysis explores how brigade members interpreted harm, navigated the collapse of medical neutrality, which was first denied by the state and then renounced by brigade members, and embedded rudimentary clinical practice within the protest itself. The paper proposes the concept of protest medicine. Unlike security-based approaches that presuppose the legitimacy of state action, protest medicine is a grassroots, politically entangled form of medical care shaped by the spatial, ethical and affective logics of protest. In doing medicine outside and against the state, protest medicine foregrounds a form of healthcare rooted in proximity, solidarity and resistance rather than neutrality, regulation and order, opening space to rethink the social and political functions of medicine when the state is a source of harm.

PMID:42466794 | DOI:10.1111/1467-9566.70243