The recent shift of funding emphasis on the part of the World Health Organization, turning from research orientation to provision of practical delivery systems, highlights the divergence of goals which must be established for the medical "haves" and "have-nots"—the developed and the developing world countries.
The same orientation applies as well to schema for medical education in these two worlds, and the implications were impressed upon me last year in what I would somewhat facetiously label a tale of two doctors, reviewing experiences I had with two American-trained native physicians in a Latin country.
Having reflected at length on a year away from familiar North American medicine, weighing the new experiences in the light of the old, I find that these two professional pathways illustrate the developed world's gifts of foreign medical aid (educational assistance) and the developing world's utilization of those grants.