Our symposium focuses on post WWII medical education and how knowledge was disseminated to students to be deployed in the practice of their work. We focus on three areas that relate to the Congress theme:

• The impact of workforce demands, policy and the evolution of specialisms in shaping medical pedagogy.
• The geography of medical education and the way in which the local, urban, regional and rural shaped the type of knowledge delivered and the manner of its delivery.
• The politics of health systems and institutional relationships and how these shaped the dissemination of knowledge.

Our symposium has eight papers, in two sessions. It is built on a collaboration between two groups of historians, at the University of Manchester and the University of Minnesota, each of which has also studied other sites. The International Congress will provide an ideal way of linking with studies from a wider range of sites, sharing knowledge, developing comparison and establishing a research network. We envisage that contacts before 2013 will uncover a range potential commentators for our sessions.

At Manchester, a program of local historical analysis was established by John Pickstone, now working with James Hopkins on the post WWII history of the Manchester Medical School. In the same group, Stephanie Snow is studying the evolution of the urban teaching hospital using St Thomas’ and Guy’s (London). At the University of Minnesota, Dominique Tobbell examines the development of academic health centres; Jennifer Gunn researches rural practice in the USA, Canada and the UK and Peter Kernahan has focussed on surgical training. Ellen More, at UMass, works on the creation of community medicine departments.

We thus have a good range of sites to study how medical schools adjusted their work to changing demands and labour markets, and how curricula and outcomes were related to changes in the production and systematisation of medical knowledge, the organisation of health care delivery, fashions in pedagogy, and changing demographics of patients and students. In each paper, contribution to these shared general issues will be complemented by studies of particular specialisms, including surgery, and how ‘general practice’ became more or less a specialism across different countries

Medical education has been studied more intensely than most aspects of education for STM, but not for the recent past. The opportunities here are intellectual as well as pragmatic, for we will be analyzing across a period which has seen massive changes in the content of medicine, and in its political economy: not least, a shift from ‘discipline led’ practice, pedagogy and self image among medical leaders, to evidence based practice in commercial and quasi-commercial contexts. Since such shifts are not confined to medicine, they may be of interest to many historians of the knowledges at work in recent STM.