He’d come here to do ethnography, the kind of anthropology he most admired—learning about a culture, not through books and artifacts but from the people who had inherited and were making culture. His special field was going to be medical ethnography. He wanted to learn everything about morbidity and mortality in the most disease-ridden country in the hemisphere. He’d write about what he discovered and in this way, he told her, “lend a voice to the voiceless.” He’d also be a doctor. He wasn’t sure which branch of medicine he’d choose. Maybe psychiatry. In any case, he’d be a doctor to poor
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