Che and Medicine : Ernesto Guevara on the Social Role of Doctors

Before Ernesto Che Guevara became 'Che,' before he traveled Latin America, before he joined Fidel in Cuba, he was a medical school student.In 1956 he wrote to his mother before leaving to go and join the guerilla expedition to Cuba: 'My path seems to be slowly but surely diverging from that of clinical medicine, but not so far that I have lost my nostalgia for hospitals.What I told you about the professorship in physiology was a lie, but not a big one.It was a lie because I never planned to accept it, but the offer was real and there was a strong possibility that they were going to give it to me, as I had an interview and everything.Anyway, that's all history. Saint Carlos Karl Marx has made a new recruit.' He had started a book on the role of the doctor in Latin America, a work he fully intended to continue writing.It remained incomplete at the time of his death in Bolivia at the age of thirty-nine, just eleven years later.