Day 3: The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical is on the corner of Keppel and Gower Street in the famed Bloomsbury district. Bloomsbury is home to the University College London, the British Museum, The British Medical Association, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and founding place of the Bloomsbury Group whose best known members were E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.  

The Library

The entire area from Tottenham Court Road to Russell Square is peppered with buildings, old and new, that create a bustling cosmopolitan campus. International students the world over come here to study every subject imaginable. Along the narrow streets that line this central area are cafes, pubs and bookstores, where if you stop long enough, you can hear languages and accents none of two which are alike. On one side of the street hurried students late to orchestra practice run past with large black cases, on the other side, art students precariously wheel a 6-foot tall paper mache tree-sculpture in a shopping cart while apologetically shouting to curious on-lookers, “it’s not finished yet!” There are theater students practicing their lines in the park, anatomy students dashing up stairs with copies of Netter in hand, and public health students rambling on about neglected tropical diseases. This is where I come in.

Campus

Bikes for rent

I wanted to study at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for many reasons. I was born in London, my father was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons here and did some of his training on this campus and my mother, a nurse who he met while training here also studied at the London School. Seeing as I was an infectious disease physician-in-training wanting to eventually work in developing nations with a focus on public health(and wanting an excuse to take 5 weeks off from any clinical responsibility sans pager or call schedule), I thought this would be a natural fit. As so far it is. But it was having the chance to study in an international setting alongside other like-minded students which had the greatest appeal for me coming here. Here, in this environment, the breadth and spectrum of points-of-view are numerous and vast. No two people, professions, or countries approach any topic at hand with identical technique. It is this variety of opinion and diversity of thought that I thrive on. Hearing the different problems these countries face in terms of health care needs, policy reform and access is expansive. It is even more humbling to realize how little we in the US know or even understand about what countries outside of us face.

Signs around UCL protesting tuition increases

The ability to step out of the US and onto the global platform is transformative. My class called “Designing Disease Control Programs in Developing Countries” has brought the world into a single classroom in the heart of Central London. There are students here from Nigeria, Ghana, France, Sweden, Slovakia, Zimbabwe, Canada, Southeast Asia, Bolivia, South America, almost every continent. Their backgrounds are varied, but their focus is universal, to establish firm tenets of public health training that they can later take back to their countries. The world renowned London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine seems just the place to start.  I am going to learn a lot here. I can already tell. But aside from the international students who visit here to study, there are the students of London itself who come here to stay. All around campus are flyers and signs for student protests against tuition increases. It seemed a world away when I watched the masses of students in protest on CNN a few months back, but as I sit alongside them on break in the refectory, I can understand what it means to them now.