Soviet Medicine

by Bernstein, Frances L.; Burton, Christopher; Healey, Dan; Filtzer, Donald (CON); Kelly, Catriona (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780875804262
• ISBN10: 0875804268
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-01
• Publisher: Northern Illinois Univ Pr

Summary

Thanks to the opening of archives and the forging of exchanges between Russian and Western scholars interested in the history of medicine, it is now possible to write new forms of social and political history in the Soviet medical field. Using the lenses of critical social histories of healthcare and medical science, and looking at both new material from Russian archives and interviews with those who experienced the Soviet health system, the contributors to this volume explore the ways experts and the Soviet state radically reshaped medical provision after the Revolution of 1917. Soviet Medicinepresents the work of an international group of leading scholars. Twelve essays-treating subjects that span the 74-year history of the Soviet Union-cover such diverse topics as how epidemiologists handled plague on the Soviet borderlands in the revolutionary era, how venereologists fighting sexually transmitted disease struggled to preserve the patientrs"s right to secrecy, and how Soviet forensic experts falsified the evidence of the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940. This important volume demonstrates the crucial role played by medical science, practice, and culture in the shaping of a modern Soviet Union and illustrates how the study of Soviet medical history can benefit historians of medicine, science, the Soviet Union, and social and gender historians.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Editors' Note
Introduction-Experts, Expertise, and New Histories of Soviet Medicine	p. 3
Toward a Soviet Psychiatry-War and the Organization of Mental Health Care in Revolutionary Russia	p. 27
Fighting Plague in Southeast European Russia, 1917-25-A Case Study in Early Soviet Medicine	p. 49
Foreign Expertise on Russian Terrain-Max Kuczynski on the Kirghiz Steppe, 1923-24	p. 71
Behind the Closed Door-VD and Medical Secrecy in Early Soviet Medicine	p. 92
Defining Sexual Maturity as the Soviet Alternative to an Age of Consent	p. 111
Vaccination against Tuberculosis with BCG-A Study of Innovation in Soviet Public Health, 1925-41	p. 132
Between Power and Experts-Soviet Doctors Examine Katyn	p. 155
Medical Expertise and the 1946-47 Famine-The Identification and Treatment of a State-Induced Illness	p. 174
ôAbortion is Killing Usö-Women's Medicine and the Dilemmas for Postwar Doctors in the Soviet Union, 1944-48	p. 195
The Political Economy of Water Supply Under Late Stalinism	p. 214
Destalinization as Detoxification?-The Expert Debate on Industrial Toxins under Khrushchev	p. 237
White Coats and Tea with Raspberry Jam-Caring for Sick Children in Late Soviet Russia	p. 258
Abbreviations and Glossary	p. 281
List of Contributors	p. 283
Index	p. 285
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