Chemistry and medicine | Ernesto Guevara talks about the social role of doctors

Che Guevara's passion for public health helped cement his legacy of socialized medicine in Latin America, and this book explores his ideas about the role of the physician. Book includes a foreword by Dr. Aleida Guevara March, a Cuban physician, the eldest of four children born to Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his second wife, Aleida March. Before Ernesto Che Guevara became “Che,” before he roamed Latin America, before he joined Fidel in Cuba, he was a medical student. In 1956, he wrote to his mother before leaving to join a guerrilla campaign in Cuba: “Slowly but surely my path seems to be deviating from the path of clinical medicine, but not to the point of losing my longing for hospitals. What I told you about the position of professor of physiology was a lie, but it was not a big lie. It was a lie because I never intended to take it, but the offer was real, and there was a good chance they would give it to me, I had an interview and everything. Anyway, this is all history. "Saint Carlos [Karl Marx] has a new recruit." He had begun a book on the role of the physician in Latin America, a work he intended to complete. The book remained unfinished when he died in Bolivia at the age of thirty-nine, just eleven years later.