This ethnography of moral evaluation is as beautifully written as it is thought provoking. Taking emergency medical triage as a strategic case, Marius Wamsiedel peels back multiple layers to uncover the complex forces shaping how frontline emergency medical workers screen and sort their clients. The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients is a book that could only be written by a careful and theoretically-driven ethnographer like Wamsiedel.

Josh Seim, Boston College; author of Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering

Based on rich ethnographic data, Wamsiedel offers a perceptive description and insightful analysis of the interaction among triage workers, patients, and companions that shapes the outcome of the classification process in a hospital setting. A superb contribution to medical sociology, symbolic interaction, sociology of morality, and public policy.

Cheris Shun-ching Chan, University of Hong Kong

Writing in an accessible and compelling style, Marius Wamsiedel unpacks the manners in which healthcare professionals’ triage work embeds broader mechanisms of social exclusion in micro-level interactions. The relevance of this timely book’s fine-tuned analysis reaches far beyond its fieldwork location in Romanian hospitals.

Sabina Stan, Dublin City University

Through a robust empirical study, Marius Wamsiedel offers many insights into the rationalization and provision of emergency healthcare in Romanian hospitals. This thorough and timely book from a health system perspective will be of interest to scholars and practitioners seeking to address health inequities among different socio-economic groups, which remains a huge challenge globally.

Shenglan Tang, Duke University

“[The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients] provides a detailed, disturbing and simultaneously fascinating description of everyday life and triage work inside Emergency Departments (EDs) […] in Romania. The book explores patient typologies and labelling practices, offering some novel insights, for example, about how Roma people are dealt with… Through an interactionalist lens, and drawing on narrative and conversational approaches to analysis, Wamsiedel examines how patients work to establish their credibility, often in the face of organised scepticism by staff who assess their legitimacy on the basis of limited biographical and physical information gleaned during initial triage.”

Sociology of Health & Illness