Anthropologists and other social scientists have published many valuable ethnographies of medical training over the past fifty yearsbut all of the major research was conducted at schools in North America or Western Europe, even though only 15% of the world’s medical schools are in those regions.
Wendland’s book is the first ethnography of medical training anywhere in the global South.
The book explores the paths taken by students learning to become doctors in Malawi, where the textbooks they use and the medical knowledge they learn may be very similar to those of students in Wisconsin, but both material resources and cultural patterns of healing are very different indeed.
Steven Feierman (University of Pennsylvania) wrote of A Heart for the Work:
"Wendland tells a rich and important story about medical students and interns who are taught a form of medicine they are unable to achieve because they lack access to the most basic supplies and technologies. They then create a form of practice all their own, one that takes determination, a deep identification with the poorest of their patients, and a quality they call 'heart.’ The book offers a rare glimpse of the world of African medicine as it is, not as imagined by donors or promoted in press releases."