Exporting medical education: Professionalism, modernization and imperialism

Abstract

Abstract Exported professionalism and medical modernization have applied to underdeveloped countries the standards of medical education prevailing in advanced industrial countries. The Rockefeller Foundation first developed this model of foreign assistance with its medical education program in China, specifically the Peking Union Medical College, beginning in 1914. Its China program, like its other programs in medical education, were designed to shape the recipient country's cultural, political and economic development to meet the needs of Western nations. Using documents from the Foundation's archives, the author finds that the Rockefeller philanthropies replaced their previous support for missionaries with medical education aid because medicine was more effective in pursuing their broad objectives. Although strong arguments were made for training large numbers of health workers to meet underdeveloped countries' pressing health needs, the Foundation supported only those medical education programs that trained elite medical professionals whom it believed were essential to “Westernizing” China and other nations. The medical education programs' goals thus differed from the Foundation's public health programs which were intended primarily to improve the health of the recipient nation's labor force. The specific policy decisions, ideological rationales, historical conditions and the consequences of the policies and programs are discussed.