How and what do medical students learn to see in encounters with patients? It is commonplace to read in the theoretical and popular literature how the process of medical education teaches students to “objectify” their patients, that is, transform them into problematic body parts rather than view them as whole human beings in fully contextualized psychological and social environments.1

This article addresses this question in a unique context, clinics for homeless people run by medical students attending a university in a city in the United States, which I will refer to as Angel Bay. What happens when clinical teaching and learning take place in a site away from the formal center of medical education, and which has an ideology that is explicit in its oppositional stance to the prevailing practices of the patient-provider relationship?