Here the concept of barefoot doctor is introduced — this is in fact how I came across the book, as it was quoted in Maggie Appleton's talk on local-first software. Ah, so wonderful, this thing of transversal ideas and cross-polination of concepts!

In 1968, after twenty years of Mao’s regime, the Medical College of Shanghai had to conclude that it was engaged in the training of “so-called first-rate doctors … who ignore five million peasants and serve only minorities in cities…. They create large expenses for routine laboratory examinations … prescribe huge amounts of antibiotics unnecessarily … and in the absence of hospital or laboratory facilities have to limit themselves to explaining the mechanisms of the disease to people for whom they cannot do anything, and to whom this explanation is irrelevant.” In China this recognition led to a major institutional inversion. Today, the same college reports that one million health workers have reached acceptable levels of competence. These health workers are laymen who in periods of low agricultural manpower needs have attended short courses, starting with the dissection of pigs, gone on to the performance of routine lab tests, the study of the elements of bacteriology, pathology, clinical medicine, hygiene, and acupuncture, and continued in apprenticeship with doctors or previously trained colleagues. These “barefoot doctors” remain  at their work places but are excused occasionally when fellow workers require their assistance. They have responsibility for environmental sanitation, for health education, immunization, first aid, primary medical care, postillness follow-up, as well as for gynecological assistance, birth control, and abortion education. Ten years after the second watershed of Western medicine had been acknowledged, China intends to have one fully competent health worker for every hundred people. China has proved that a sudden inversion of a major institution is possible. It remains to be seen if this deprofessionalization can be sustained against the overweening ideology of unlimited progress and pressures from classical doctors to incorporate their barefoot homonym as part-time professionals on the bottom rung of a medical hierarchy.