Transforming Medical Education

How teaching practices, social justice, and professional identities have shaped medical education around the globe throughout the last millennium.

Transforming Medical Education compiles twenty-one historical case studies that critically foreground processes of learning, teaching, and defining medical communities in educational contexts. As a collection, this book makes a powerful argument about the contextual diversity of instruction and identity formation in medicine.

In recent decades, researchers have studied the cultures of medicine and the ways in which context and identity shape both individual experiences and structural barriers in medical education. The essays in this collection offer new insights into the deep histories of these processes, across time and around the globe.

Transforming Medical Education compiles twenty-one historical case studies that foreground processes of learning, teaching, and defining medical communities in educational contexts. The chapters are organized around the themes of knowledge transmission, social justice, identity, pedagogy, and the surprising affinities between medical and historical practice. By juxtaposing original research on diverse geographies and eras – from medieval Japan to twentieth-century Canada, and from colonial Cameroon to early Republican China – the volume disrupts traditional historiographies of medical education by making room for schools of medicine for revolutionaries, digital cadavers, emotional medical students, and the world’s first mandatory Indigenous community placement in an accredited medical curriculum. This unique collection of international scholarship honours historian, physician, and professor Jacalyn Duffin for her outstanding contributions to the history of medicine and medical education.

An invaluable scholarly resource and teaching tool, Transforming Medical Education offers a provocative study of what it means to teach, learn, and belong in medicine.