LAUSR

ABSTRACT Through the medium of a hospital ethnography, this paper explores the debilitating impacts of the 2010 monsoon floods on Gilgit-Baltistan’s public health sector, and interrogates how its escalating harms coalesced with long-standing state neglects to generate medical precarity and loss, and spark debate concerning Pakistan’s responsiveness and commitments to this politically marginalized and remote region. In Gilgit Town, the region’s administrative capital, the state’s failure to adequately prepare for and offset the floods’ direct and indirect effects had catastrophic consequences for public sector hospitals, where healthcare providers worked without sufficient resources, treatment options were greatly diminished, and patients experienced significantly higher risks and worsened health outcomes. In providing ethnographic snapshots of the ways that the floods and disaster-related governance gaps shaped service provision at the region’s primary referral hospital, the paper centralizes healthcare providers’ accounts of the inadequacy of Pakistan’s response to the crisis, and their claims that the state’s failure to protect them from the floods’ worst effects was symptomatic of its historic lack of care for Gilgit-Baltistan and its peoples.