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Background: The educational model adopted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Faculty of Medicine is constructivist; it is a model based on competence development. It aims to provide learning environments that incorporate real activities (it helps the students to develop social negotiation skills, as part of their integral learning; it encourages them to take a critical and reflexive approach; and it is also a student-centered model). However, many challenges arise when this model is implemented in the context of hospital environments. Therefore, our aim was to analyse the hospital as an hermeneutical community and as a power relations scenario, contrary to the constructivist model. Methods: In the analysis of a conflict between a chief of a medical department and an undergraduated medical intern, we use Miranda Fricker's categories discriminatory epistemic injustice, and testimonial injustice, as well as Foucault's power relationships and knowledge. Results: The program implementation is placed in the context of power relations and different disciplinary methods that could affect the training process of the students, whose educational background belongs to the constructivist model. This in part is due to the existence of informal normative structures that are hidden in the process of medical knowledge construction at the hospital scenario. Conclusion: Practices of epistemic discriminatory injustice in the hospital environment increase vulnerability conditions for medical students in their education process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research we focus on the medical evangelist Levi B. Salmans, and The Good Samaritan sanitarium. Doctor Salmans lived in Mexico for about 50 years (1885-1935). During the first part of his stay, he was devoted to found churches and Methodist schools. However, from 1891 he took a turn in his career by founding dispensaries in different towns of Guanajuato to create, in 1899, the private charity association for the sick and infirm The Good Samaritan. His intense, intellectual, and practical work led him to create health journals, to train nurses, and to promote physiotherapies in accordance with the science advances of that time. By itself, this research shows that the history of medicine in Mexico still has long way to go and that Protestant communities, in favor of modernity and scientific knowledge, took a big part in shaping the history of this discipline in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]