Soviet Medicine - 9780875804262

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 Medicine presents the work of an international group of leading scholars. Twelve essaysùtreating subjects that span the 74-year history of the Soviet Unionùcover 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 patient's right to secrecy, and how Soviet forensic experts falsified the evidence of the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940. Contributing authors also examine such subjects as innovation in Soviet public health, medical expertise and the 1946-47 famine, and industrial toxins under Khrushchev.

This important volume demonstrates the crucial role played by medical science, practice, and culture in the shaping of a modern Soviet Union. Soviet Medicine will appeal to historians of medicine, science, the Soviet Union, and social and gender historians.

Frances L. Bernstein is Associate Professor of History at Drew University and author of The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses.

Christopher Burton is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.

Dan Healey is Reader in the Department of History at Swansea University, and author of Bolshevik Sexual Forensics.