The Gulag doctors
life, death, and medicine in Stalin's labour camps
- ISBN: 9780300187137
- Editorial: Yale University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2024
- Lugar de la edición: New Haven. Estados Unidos de Norteamérica
- Encuadernación: Cartoné
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 368
- Idiomas: Inglés
A pioneering history of medical care in Stalin's Gulag-showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions
A byword for injustice, suffering, and mass mortality, the Gulag exploited prisoners, compelling them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, eighteen million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness.
It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in the camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics-about 40 percent of whom were prisoners.
Dan Healey explores the lives of the medical staff who treated inmates in the Gulag. Doctors and nurses faced extremes of repression, supply shortages, and isolation. Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases, and "saved" a proportion of their patients. They taught apprentices and conducted research too. This groundbreaking account offers an unprecedented view of Stalin's forced-labour camps as experienced by its medical staff.
INTRODUCTION A 'Ukrainian Mark Twain' and the essence of Gulag medicine
PART I DOCTORS INSIDE THE BARBED WIRE
1 'THEY WERE THE FIRST': Pioneers of the Gulag medical service
2 'A NIGHTMARE PARALLEL WORLD': A chekist in the clinic?
3 'I CHOSE KOLYMA': From the medical school benches to the hospitals of the Gulag
PART II CAREERS IN GULAG MEDICINE
4 'FEELING MY WAY': Apprenticeships behind barbed wire 5 SISTERS OF MERCY AND KOMSOMOL GIRLS: Nursing in the Gulag
6 THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING LIFE: A prisoner in the morgue
PART III RESEARCHERS AND DREAMERS
7 'I DO NOT ASSIST SIMULATORS': A prisoner-psychiatrist challenges Gulag conventions
8 'YOU WILL BE SINGING THESE SONGS': The radium-water spa of the zeks
CONCLUSION 'No archival materials will be gathered, and people will scatter . . .'