Caring for the wounded of the First World War was tough and challenging work, demanding extensive knowledge, technical skill, and high levels of commitment. Although allied nurses were admired in their own time for their altruism and courage, their image was distorted by the lens of popular mythology. They came to be seen as self-sacrificing heroines, romantic foils to the male combatant and doctors' handmaidens, rather than being appreciated as trained professionals performing significant work in their own right.
This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. "Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it," he writes, "hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can"t tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Not that Africa is one place.
Mindbend is a novel by the novelist Robin Cook first published in 1985.
Arolen is a giant pharma company, expanding at rapid pace and bringing more and more doctors into its clutches. Once doctors go on CME onboard a cruise organised by Arolen, they come back totally changed, in personality and opinions. Strangely many of them opt for job in Julian Clinic, even at the cost of leaving their lucrative private practices. Incidentally number of therapeutic abortions at the Julian Clinic are also rising. Hero of the novel, Dr Adam Schoneberg, has to leave his medical education midway for want of money as his wife becomes pregnant
Medical Education for the Future: Identity, Power and Location
The purpose of medical education is to benefit patients by improving the work of doctors. Patient centeredness is a centuries old concept in medicine, but there is still a long way to go before medical education can truly be said to be patient centered. Ensuring the centrality of the patient is a particular challenge during medical education, when students are still forming an identity as trainee doctors, and conservative attitudes towards medicine and education are common amongst medical teachers, making it hard to bring about improvements.
