“Drawing on an impressive amount of original, empirical research and written in an engaging style, A Heart for the Work is an extremely interesting look at medical training in Malawi. Claire Wendland argues that trainee doctors, facing an enormous gap between the ideals of their training and the conditions of medical practice, forge their own set of practical ethics and their own professional culture. Though this creativity is largely born of necessity, it is remarkable.”

Megan Vaughan, University of Cambridge

“Wendland delivers a tour de force on the culture of biomedicine and biomedicine as African healing. A Heart for the Work details how the clinical experience for Malawian interns yields a very different outcome than in the global North, despite similar courses and curricula. Rather than emotional detachment from their patients in a stance of scientific objectivity, they commit to ‘love, passion, and spirit’—‘having a heart for the work, for their patients’ in a moral economy shaped by extensive kinship ties, religious ideals, the need for hope when medicines are scarce, Umunthu— humanity—and political engagement. Wendland argues for the cultural understanding of all medicine, including that in the North driven by high-tech, pharmaceutics, and ‘objective’ science.”

John M. Janzen, University of Kansas

“This engaging and at times contentious book explores the lives of Malawian medical students and, through their stories, questions our assumptions about medicine, Africa, colonialism and globalization. . . . A fascinating work.”

Times Higher Education

“Claire Wendland provides a compelling account of medical training in Africa in A Heart for the Work. In her analyses of the socialization of Malawian physicians and the practice of African biomedicine, Wendland makes a valuable contribution to the literature on medical power/knowledge, particularly in poor and postcolonial contexts, and provides an all too rare example of anthropology ‘studying up’ in Africa. Herself a Northern-trained obstetrician-gynecologist and anthropologist, Wendland uses her case to argue that biomedical professionals everywhere are shaped as much by the social, cultural, and material conditions in which they train and practice as by the characteristics of biomedicine in hegemonic form. This coproduction, then, has important consequences for individual physicians and, through their medical practice, for their patients and their nation.”

Rebecca Warne Peters | African Studies Review