Sergiei Zatravkin

Having found conflicting versions of the past in publications on the history of Soviet medicine, the authors of the article problematized the evidence with which historians work. This led to the study of the production and interaction of statistical and narrative statements of the health care authorities of the 1930s, that is, their reporting and futuristic pipe dreams. The comparison of the medical statistics published in the official directories and the current reporting of medical institutions revealed discrepancies between the published and collected information. Criticism of the official figures by contemporaries gave researchers the opportunity to reveal material and construction technologies of a utopian reality, from the power of which even modern researchers find it hard to free themselves.

An official’s complaint about a Polish private doctor who treated his children for scarlet fever in 1827 gave rise to a unique document – a description of the treatment process and of the doctor’s interaction with patients, pharmacists, and Russian authorities. Such evidence is rarely found in the Russian archives. Since private doctors did not report to the officials, their testimonies, as a rule, are not preserved in the state archives. A text found in the archives of the Vilna Medical Board stimulated the authors of the present article to investigate the state of medical care and medical culture of the Polish population that became part of the Russian Empire after the Third Partition of Poland. Vishlenkova and Zatravkin have found that, unlike the rest of the Empire, a rather dense network of private medical care existed in Vilna province until the 1830s, and the level of scientific medical culture of the patients allowed them to establish control over treatment.