A Tibetan Barefoot Doctor at work in the field, Woodcut, Li Huan-ming, People's Republic of China 1974 -- Daily LIFT #1935 The barefoot doctor program emerged in response to a severe shortage of doctors in rural China, where most physicians were concentrated in urban areas. Before 1949 and the triumph of the Revolution, there were only about 40,000 doctors for a population of roughly 540 million, leaving rural communities vulnerable to diseases such as schistosomiasis. The pr