Eve Marder explains why all scientists should spend time living and working in a foreign country.

As emergency physicians, we are privileged to be in a field that crosses more boundaries than any other medical specialty. It is a calling. Our skills are portable and transferable across cultural and geographic disparities. For these reasons, many of us are drawn to sharing our knowledge and training across the globe – towards treating patients in underserved and austere environments abroad. T...

"Cultural systems are coherent patterns of understanding built from the reciprocal relationships among 1) knowledge or beliefs: the shared conceptual understandings of what or how things are; 2) patterns of practice: both the models for doing and the model-guided, habituated actions of everyday practice; 3) 3 tools and artifacts: the means and ends of practical action; and 4) patterns of affect...