The Anatomy of Boundaries in Medicine investigates how physicians experience and navigate the law in encounters with undocumented patients in the context of hospital care. Anchored in modern interpretations of liminality, anomie, and alienation, and drawing on vivid empirical research, it illuminates how these professionals encounter, construct, and embody law in everyday clinical work. Through rich qualitative data, the book introduces legal disavowal, medicolegal anomie, and legal communitas as novel theoretical concepts, expanding critical sociolegal theory and capturing how law disrupts, fractures, or is reimagined in medical contexts. In doing so, it advances understandings of liminality and the lived experience of law in medicine by mapping the lived realities of law on the threshold between care and migration control.

Distinctive in its interdisciplinary framing, empirically grounded theorisation, and original illustrations, this book actively shifts the gaze away from damage-centred research on undocumented bodies, to instead amplify and unsettle the structural dynamics of law, medicine, and power. Speaking directly to scholars of sociolegal studies, medicine and the medical humanities, and migration and border studies, this book is for anyone interested in how borders enter the clinic, how law is lived in and through medicine, and how the politics of care are embodied and transformed through encounters with those who inhabit the thresholds of society.