Overview

Burnout is common among doctors in the West, so one might assume that a medical career in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, would place far greater strain on the idealism that drives many doctors. But, as A Heart for the Work makes clear, Malawian medical students learn to confront poverty creatively, experiencing fatigue and frustration but also joy and commitment on their way to becoming physicians. The first ethnography of medical training in the global South, Claire L. Wendland’s book is a moving and perceptive look at medicine in a world where the transnational movement of people and ideas creates both devastation and possibility. Wendland, a physician anthropologist, conducted extensive interviews and worked in wards, clinics, and operating theaters alongside the student doctors whose stories she relates. From the relative calm of Malawi’s College of Medicine to the turbulence of training at hospitals with gravely ill patients and dramatically inadequate supplies, staff, and technology, Wendland’s work reveals the way these young doctors engage the contradictions of their circumstances, shedding new light on debates about the effects of medical training, the impact of traditional healing, and the purposes of medicine.

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9780226893259

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Reviews

"""Drawing on an impressive amount of original, empirical research and written in an engaging style, A Heart for the Work is an extremely interesting look at medical training in Malawi. Wendland argues that trainee doctors, facing an enormous gap between the ideals of their training and the conditions of medical practice, forge their own set of practical ethics and their own professional culture."" - Megan Vaughan, University of Cambridge"""

Drawing on an impressive amount of original, empirical research and written in an engaging style, A Heart for the Work is an extremely interesting look at medical training in Malawi. Wendland argues that trainee doctors, facing an enormous gap between the ideals of their training and the conditions of medical practice, forge their own set of practical ethics and their own professional culture. - Megan Vaughan, University of Cambridge

Author Information

Claire L. Wendland is assistant professor in the departments of Anthropology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and honorary senior lecturer in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Malawi College of Medicine.

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