Medicine Is a Social Science

Updated: Apr 15

Author: Maya Tsingos

Author Affiliation: Rush Medical College

VJM Spring Edition 2026

Abstract

The intensity of medical education can feel all-consuming, narrowing students’ attention to the classroom and clinic at the expense of the world at large. This narrative essay explores my grappling with my role as a medical student amid social unrest, and the history of student organizing and resistance, with the aim of highlighting the potential of medical students as agents of societal change.

The day the news broke that federal immigration agents had killed a man in a suburb of Chicago, I was at my desk trying to memorize pathology images. Since then, I seem to be living a time loop–suddenly remembering what is happening around me, trying to be present, then falling back into the numbing slog of preparing for the next exam. I have gone to a protest here and there, attended a community training program, read in stolen minutes. Still, in the grand scheme of things, it feels like very little. In my mind, the choice should be easy. Yet too often, I have told myself I would show up next time, and have opened my notes instead.

I first noticed the name Virchow popping up repeatedly in these very notes, a few months into medical school. Among his many namesakes are a node, a triad, a syndrome, a cell, a line, and a theory. Rudolf Virchow was a German physician, writer, and active politician. Known today as the “father of modern pathology,” his scientific work led to momentous developments in the understanding of cell theory and its applications to disease and medicine at large. But Virchow was also a proponent of social medicine. He advocated for patient education, self-government, shifting taxes from the poor to the rich, and improving public infrastructure. “Medicine is a social science,” he famously stated, “and politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale.”

That being the case, I thought to myself, through lectures and anatomy lab and long, fluorescent hours in the campus library, what does it mean to become a doctor in a time when people are being harmed by state machinery? And what does it mean to become a doctor while being told, explicitly and implicitly, to keep your head down until you graduate?

I am not the first to have these questions. Across history, physicians have been involved in the struggle for societal change—Virchow, Sun, Fanon, Guevara. But medical students, too, as I have learned, have their own traditions of resistance, of transformation, of liberation, their own histories of acting as agents of change.

In the late 19th century, the Edinburgh Seven, also known by the mythological allusion Septem contra Edinam, became the first female medical students in the United Kingdom in a fight for their right to train in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. It is estimated that at least twelve women were involved to some degree in the campaign, though seven were named in the original 1870 petition to the Royal Infirmary to be allowed to study medicine. This would profoundly reshape professional medical education, though it initially incited, amongst other hostile reactions, a riot of hundreds who attempted to block them from sitting an anatomy exam. The women all went on to complete their educations at other universities, having been denied graduation from the University of Edinburgh in their lifetimes––though the original members of the Seven were each awarded posthumous degrees in 2019, exactly 150 years after their matriculation.

Between 1942 and 1943, a group of five students and one professor from LMU Munich led the White Rose, an intellectual resistance group operating in the German Reich. Originally founded by two medical students, the group wrote and distributed pamphlets, and ran graffiti campaigns calling for active opposition to the National Socialist regime. The students’ experiences at the front, serving in the medical corps, helped shape their understanding of German atrocities and their commitment to resist them. “We will not be silent,” they wrote. “The White Rose will not leave you in peace.” Six months after the core members were arrested and executed, Allied planes airdropped thousands of copies of the group’s sixth manifesto, which had been smuggled into the United Kingdom, over Germany.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a national health alliance known as the Student Health Organization (SHO), which brought together various health science students across the United States, aimed to place social issues at the center of health education, resisting the traditional curricula, which created physicians who were “apathetic, unimaginative, artless and impotent in [their] relationship to social and political problems,” according to a 1968 article.¹ The first SHOs organized local and national forums and seminars. They also organized student health projects that collaborated directly with community organizations. Over time, these student groups began to be funded by universities, changing the tide of their own medical education, in the hope of becoming health scientists as well as activist-citizens. In the decade or so it operated, the nationwide network of SHOs challenged the system of organized medicine, including repeated confrontations with the American Medical Association (AMA), in particular over its attempts to block the passing of Medicare and Medicaid. “Caution: The AMA May Be Dangerous to Your Health” was one of its slogans, printed on pins sported by student organizers across the country.

The twenty-first century is no stranger either to medical student resistance. Field hospitals set up in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution were staffed by physicians and volunteers, including medical students, whose tasks included sorting through donated medications to stock the hospitals’ pharmacies. During the 2018 Sudanese Revolution, physicians and medical students were among those on the front lines of protest mobilization. During the Hong Kong protests in 2019 and 2020, volunteer medics, many of them medical students, were central to protest organizing. White Coats for Black Lives is a movement of medical students that fights against injustices against Black people both within and outside the medical system. Since 2014, students have participated in protests, die-ins, and broader racial justice organizing.

In the face of rising authoritarianism and fascism in the United States, it may be difficult for us as medical students to juggle the demands of school with those of organizing. We may feel powerless–I am certainly not immune to the feeling. But these are not unprecedented times. Behind us stand centuries of medical student resistance, led by people just like us who found it within themselves to fight back. Our position is a unique one, balanced between the moral impetus of being future physicians and the power we hold as students–our cohorts, the organizational resources at our disposal, even our growing practical skills. And what we choose to engage with now plays an important role in our professional identity formation, shaping our future careers.

Medical students, we are part of a long tradition of changemaking. Let us not bury our heads in the sand of our seemingly interminable studies. Let us be awake and aware. Let us read. Let us speak out. Let us show up, however imperfectly. Let us march in the streets, stand with our communities, and join them in song. Let us not shy away from difficulties, for we must face them regardless. Resist! Organize! We are not separate from any of this. We have a role to play in protecting the world both we and our future patients will live in, together.

References

1. King L, Schwartz L. Student activists see health in new ways. Modern Hospital. 1968;110(5):118-20.