The Contradictions of Medical Education

This book presents a political view of medical education based on dialectical analysis of a range of practice. This approach, and the contradictions that it reveals, will enable anyone with an interest in medical education development, or in teaching or researching medical education, to do so systematically, critically and constructively for their own context. How the analysis of medical education was built is described. It also offers relevant academic commentary on the practice that forms that basis of the political view. The issues addressed include assessment, curriculum, teaching methods, social issues, identity, professional values, management, undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing medical education, and the process of becoming an educationalist. These are widely discussed topics in medical education, not yet unified on the basis of a critical theoretical framework. Education is a social science so the book is guided to understand the links between natural science theories that underpin medicine, to the social science theory that underpins medical education.

This book is ground-breaking, in being the first and only political analysis developed specifically for medical education, and based on the practice of that discipline in a variety of contexts in the global north and the global south. The academic commentaries clarify the relationship between the political analysis of medical education and the existing content of the discipline that is widely taught and used. This view of medical education will enable those working, teaching, studying or researching in this field to analyse, criticise, understand, challenge, and build on current knowledge and practice appropriately to their own context.