Despite decades of research on slums and the health of their residents, earlier studies have largely overlooked the role of human ‘emotions’ in researching and shaping healthcare vulnerabilities. In this paper, we draw on our experiences of conducting fieldwork among slum dwellers across the Guwahati Metropolitan City in India and highlight the grounded ethical tensions encountered during research engagement and foreground “emotions” as a critical lens in understanding vulnerabilities in health, including airborne tuberculosis (TB), among socially and spatially marginalized slum dwellers. We argue that engaging with ‘emotions’ both as an epistemological and methodological lens provides deeper insights into public healthcare challenges and has the potential to form and implement ‘dignified medical care’ policies that are grounded on moral and ethical values for the marginalized. We thus invite public healthcare scholars to incorporate the lens of “emotions” to design equitable healthcare policies for vulnerable populations like slum dwellers.