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In Permeable Hospitals, medical sociologist Susan E. Bell makes an original contribution to understanding a complex and urgent global health issue - caring for an increasingly diverse and mobile patient population. Bell identifies the twenty-first-century hospital as the center of a complex network of social and health care interactions among patients and medical communities that are distinguished by transnational movement. She examines how culture and language are negotiated during face-to-face interactions in outpatient visits at one Maine hospital and shows how caring is done for refugee and immigrant patients. To capture this process, Bell advances a new theoretical framework, that twenty-first-century hospitals are nodes in transnational social networks. During appointments, temporary combinations of people, objects, practices, and ideas assemble at the hospital and disperse at the appointment's end. Because the interactions take place in a teaching hospital, the thinking that underlies diagnosis and treatment is made explicit and evaluated in backstage teaching areas where residents report about their patients to senior physicians. Bell's landmark book is based on a qualitative study that included nine months at the hospital observing interactions among adult New Mainer patients and clinicians, interpreters, and staff.