Paths To Medicine Chapter Summaries

A summary of chapters three, four, and five. In chapter three “Paths to Medicine”, we get exactly that a description of the types of students that make it into the College of Medicine in Malawi and how it is that these students got there. The majority of students are male, Christian, ethnically diverse, and highly educated, which is not a fair representation of their country (67). The wealthy of Malawi basically made it into school, because having a post-secondary education in Malawi was not very common only the wealthy could afford to send their children out to get good educations especially one good enough to get into the medical school. There was a way to make it into the medical school through the public school system however as Wendland describes that path was very hard and unlikely. She also does a very good job of representing …show more content…
“The Word Made Flesh” which was her analysis of the preclinical years, it further explores the even more transformational clinical experiences of Malawian medical students. It describes how the social and economic realities of their patients are intertwined in the Malawian hospital. Wendland describes how the clinical experience in the really understaffed and undersupplied hospital can be demoralizing to the students, as it challenges their idea that with the knowledge they are acquiring that they would not only know what to do but would actually be able to carry out such interventions. These medical students “were already aware of the magnitude of poverty and suffering that occurred in their country, but they were not used to facing it as those charged to heal yet unable to do so,” (133). Being confronted with these nearly unbearable clinical challenges, caused these students to begin to lose faith in religion, in the government, and even in the doctors tasked with teaching them. Within this context, the hope and empowerment of the preclinical years gives way to anger and