Introduction:

Elitism in medical education is a historical phenomenon. Beginning at the European universities of the Middle Ages, the teaching of medicine became a monopoly of the elite, excluding less privileged social groups. In Brazil, the elitization of medical knowledge occurred with the arrival of the royal family in 1808, reinforcing the role of doctors as protagonists of health, while popular healing practices were devalued. In the US, Abraham Flexner influenced medical teaching worldwide with an elitist model based on biomedical logic.

Objectives:

The objective is to understand the factors that reproduced the elitist context in medical teaching, investigate how these aspects influence the exclusion of certain social groups in the medical environment and point out ways to discuss and tackle the problem.

Methods:

This is an integrative literature review of 14 articles selected from 182, published between 2012 and 2022, and filtered from the PubMed, Scielo, Lilacs, Web of Science and Scopus databases.

Results and Discussion:

There are similarities among those in the privileged group in medicine, characterised by being white, heterosexual and cisgender men of favourable socioeconomic status, compared to the systematically marginalized group of women belonging to ethnic minorities, low socio-economic class and/or part of the LGBTQIA+ community. This coincidence has historical and economic bases that reflect a larger structure, which distributes privileges based on the criteria of race, gender, social class and sexual orientation. Among the historical processes that have reproduced this pattern, the colonization process of countries such as Brazil is cited, marked by the exploitation, erasure and imposition of a medical culture and science guided by a European standard; racism and chauvinism that as ideologies, remain criteria for the distribution of privileges in class society and cisheteronormativity, which also excludes bodies and sexual orientations and the production of health care knowledge and practices.

Conclusion:

Critical epistemologies such as those found in the intersectional thinking of black feminism and in Aníbal Quijano and Audre Lorde’s coloniality of the power are presented as ways to break this norm, giving rise to questions of its roots for the organization of collective struggles and forms of production of knowledge that meet the interests of historically oppressed groups.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )