A Heart for the Work

by Wendland, Claire L.

• ISBN13: 9780226893273
• ISBN10: 0226893278
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-30
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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, asA Heart for the Workmakes 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.

Author Biography

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 Obstertics and Gynaecology at the University of Malawi College of Medicine.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Prologue: Arrival Stories	p. 1
Introduction: Moral Order and Medical Science	p. 6
All Part of the Same Big Mess: Mkume Lifa	p. 32
Medicine and Healing in a Postcolonial State	p. 36
Serving Our Nation: Joe Phoya	p. 59
In the District: Evelyn Kazembe	p. 63
Paths to Medicine	p. 67
Welcome to the College of Medicine	p. 85
Seeing Deeply and Seeing Through in the Basic Science Years	p. 89
Welcome to Queens	p. 115
The Word Made Flesh: Hospital Experience and the Clinical Crisis	p. 119
Complications: Johnson Chisale	p. 148
On the Ward: Enelesi Nyirenda	p. 150
Resource is a Verb: Realities and Responses	p. 154
Someone Else in This World: Duncan Kasinja	p. 186
As Human as Everybody Else: Zaithwa Mthindi	p. 189
Doctors for the People: Theory and Practice	p. 195
Epilogue: Departure	p. 222
Technical Appendix: Research Methods	p. 225
Notes	p. 245
Glossary	p. 293
References	p. 295
Index	p. 319
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