ER Medici in prima linea: il pronto soccorso come scenario di guerra

The article analyzes ER as a war scenario. It shows how the popular NBC TV series has adopted a critical position regarding the US intervention in Iraq. Besides, war has also been used as a metaphor for the battles that doctors and nurses must fight every day in order to defeat illness and trauma and to restore the integrity of the patients’ bodies. Using Schmitt’s and Agamben’s categories, those bodies thus become the symbol of the social body, while the medical staff is the bearer of a “healing exception” as opposed to the US state of exception and its role as global supercop.