The Golden Hour

Abstract

In interviews with leading emergency medicine doctors and developers of a national system of pre-hospital care in Nepal, they allude to the significance of treating trauma patients during “the golden hour”. This flash ethnography highlights the intersubjective meaning making of an outsider ethnographer, whose familiarity with the metaphor comes from photography, and doctors, who use the phrase in its emergency medicine application to describe the brief window of opportunity to intervene after a traumatic injury.