Global Pulse Blog

In today’s guest post, recent medical graduate Laura Janneck, MD, MPH reflects on an elective course in social medicine she took in Uganda. Dr. Janneck is an AMSA alum, and now a resident in Emergency Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston. For further information about the course, see details below.

Over the course of my involvement in global health during medical school, I began to narrow my interests toward humanitarian assistance and global health delivery in post-conflict settings. Last year, during my fourth year of medical school, I participated in a new course on social medicine being taught in Gulu, northern Uganda, a region that is recently recovering from a 20 year civil conflict. This course, called Beyond the Biological Basis of Disease: The Social and Economic Causation of Illness was very well organized, with didactics on a range of topics from the health consequences of internal displacement, to the portrayal of Africans in the Western media. We also were able to spend time on the wards seeing patients with a range of diseases and syndromes common in the region. The keystone of this course, however, is the international student body. Half of the medical students study at Gulu University and hailed from around Uganda. The other half were American and European. This enabled fantastic discussions with different perspectives on the issues we were studying, and planted the seeds of long-term friendships between colleagues from around the world. I enjoyed my time there so much that I went back to Gulu for another clinical rotation later that semester.

If you have any questions about the course or are interested in applying, please email the course directors at: social.medicine@yahoo.com. Applications are due July 30, 2010.