Dan Healey Livres

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.

In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks empowered forensic doctors, primarily trained under the tsarist regime, to address issues of sexuality. They believed forensic medicine could offer scientific solutions to sexual disorder in the new society. This exploration of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine examines its authority in confronting sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s with publications by forensic doctors and psychiatrists from prerevolutionary and early Soviet periods, highlighting the specialists' roles. The study also delves into how doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, revealing a revolutionary perspective that considered individual desire. It sheds light on the radical and reactionary forces influencing the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers redefined sexual crime and disorder. Forensic doctors grappled with replacing the age of consent with "sexual maturity," which framed female sexuality as a collective resource rather than an individual trait. Concepts like "innocence," "experience," and virginity were pivotal in rape and abuse trials. While psychiatrists distanced themselves from sexual psychology in their investigations, Soviet physicians explored the desires of the two-sexed citizen, leading to a modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite. Ultimately, Healey concludes that the v