Che and Medicine

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 an ...

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.