Health is a collective experience.
Disease and physical maladies afflict humans across all geographical, cultural, or temporal contexts. Medicine, on the other hand, has never represented a shared set of values. Sick and suffering individuals understand their own bodies in culturally specific ways, relying on their local traditions and beliefs when they seek medical assistance.
Today, nearly all professionals in public health, medicine, and the media underscore how the availability of effective medical care varies dramatically and depends on the economic circumstances, political will, social commitments, and a wide array of other factors that influence an individual’s life and treatment. But how do we reconcile the universal language of health, which contains very particular individual encounters, with larger medical institutions and practices? We believe the answer comes with experience of other cultures of health, illness, and medicine. When we step outside our familiar experiences with medicine and health, when we reach across the diverse cultural boundaries that shape medicine at the local level, we begin to critically examine the assumptions that we hold as objective truths.
In order to facilitate this discourse on global medical practices, the Arts and Humanities section commences a series of reflections written by Yale students and recent alumni who have engaged in global health activities and initiatives. Their transcultural interactions do not simply demonstrate that medicine is a relative term. As we observe and experience other medical systems and practices, we become more familiar with very real disparities in access to care. International medical exchanges foster an improved understanding of the beliefs and values of other individuals and societies while simultaneously calling our attention to the needs and desires of patients outside our normal sphere of vision. In the experiences of these Yale students and alumni, we travel around the world to encounter medicine as we do not normally see it in our everyday interactions.
In this first installment, Sarah Igoe (YC ’08) narrates her 2007 trip to Honduras as a volunteer on a weeklong medical mission trip. Igoe recalls her surprises, recounts the scenes she witnessed and the people she met, and charts changes in her awareness about both the collective experience of illness and the vast disparities that characterize global health in the 21st century. Audrey Provenzano, currently a third-year student at Yale University Medical School, writes of her experiences at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda, where she worked during the summer after her first year in medical school. Provenzano learned lessons at her patients’ bedsides in Kampala that she could never find in her textbooks and lectures in New Haven — the devastating effects of poverty, the vast disparities between access to health care in different areas of the world, and the need, as she puts it, to “take in the whole patient” when considering how to provide the best possible care.