'All welfare states must ration health care because no public system is able to finance the entire (theoretically boundless and largely supply-driven) demand for health care arising within such a system. As a result, they face a growing number of hard choices at different levels of decision making. At the macro level, it has to be decided which amount of a given Gross Domestic Product is to be used for medical purposes as against other societal concerns and interests. At the next lower meso level, it has to be decided how the medical budget as a whole is to be distributed among the various branches and sub-divisions within medicine. And finally, at the micro level of concrete physician-patient interaction it has to be decided who shall receive (or be denied) which kinds of treatment. All of this involves serious, at times even tragic, trade-offs. Among the most difficult problems to which the inevitability of rationing gives rise is the need to select recipients for lifesaving medical procedures and services for whose receipt more patients are medically indicated than can be served with the available resources. Essentially, what has to be decided in such situations is "who shall live when not all can live" (Childress). But even though their incidence is increasingly becoming an everyday phenomenon in medicine, very little is known about how such decisions are actually made. What considerations and criteria guide them, who benefits and who loses out, why they and not others? Are there systematic policies for the allocation of life and death - patterns cutting across medical subfields and local contexts - or do the respective practices vary from culture to culture, nation to nation, hospital to hospital, physician to physician? How are these policies (if any) and practices accounted for, how are they explained and justified to those concerned? And what do the policy takers think, the clients and tax payers who are directly or indirectly affected by them? Are they aware of the dilemma? Do they have strong views about how it is - or ought to be - resolved? Or are they largely ignorant and/or indifferent? Proposals are invited for papers addressing some of these (or related) questions empirically and from a sociological perspective, rather than normatively, as does the bulk of the existing literature on medical triage. If you are interested, please send an abstract of no more than one page to Volker Schmidt: socvhs@nus.edu.sg.