University College London

Do you want to prepare yourself for working in the real world as a medical practitioner in diverse cultural contexts and with different patient populations?

How about exploring a wide range of healing practices that include everything from shamanism and witchcraft to reproductive technologies and maternal health?

Would you like to have a chance to pursue a dissertation research project of your choice?

Want to immerse yourself in a different world of knowledge and understanding?

Then come and study the IBSc in Medical Anthropology and take a journey of discovery to look at medical training and what it means to be a doctor with fresh eyes.

This Integrated BSc is uniquely designed to provide Medical students with techniques for gaining cross cultural understanding through specially designed courses including ‘Clinical Ethnography’ and ‘Anthropology for Medical Students’ to provide them with life long learning skills that they can use throughout their medical career. Students will be taught key concepts in Medical Anthropology to examine how health and well being are socially and culturally constituted in contexts of cultural diversity.

We examine issues such as gender and the body, ritual and religion, new health technologies, global health politics, and barriers and obstacles to health and healing. Beyond this core syllabus, students are able to select from across the full range of disciplinary options in the topic ranging from social and cultural anthropology, evolutionary anthropology and human ecology.

Medical Anthropology at UCL provides a comprehensive and innovative teaching, learning and research environment with an active student society. The department offers one of the best and most exciting programmes of broad based anthropology for graduate and undergraduate study in the UK . We are committed to developing medical anthropology at the intersection of, and in dialogue with clinical practice, primary care, public health, psychiatry, demography, genomic science and technology.

Entry requirements

No previous academic knowledge of social anthropology is required, though an interest in experiencing ways of thinking beyond scientific biomedicine may be an advantage.

You must be:

  • enrolled on a UK MBBS course.
  • successfully completed or about to complete 2 years of a UK MBBS course. If you are currently in your second year of study and you are successful in getting a place to study with us, a condition of your offer will be to pass your 2nd year of study.
  • It is at the discretion of individual iBSc programmes if they wish to accept students where they have completed more than two years of MBBS training. If you are made an offer, then successfully passing your current year of study will be made a condition of offer.
  • hold GCSE English Language and Mathematics at grade C or 5.
  • have achieved a minimum of ABB in your A levels or equivalent.

Closing date

Applications for external students will open in February and close at the end of March.