Doctor and Patient in the Soviet Union.

In this article I give some impressions of the actual treatment of people in the Soviet Union in health and in disease, basing it to a fair degree on notes made during a visit to Russia in the late summer of I939. In Britain we are justly proud of the farreaching developments in the prevention and treatment of disease which have taken place in the last I50 years. The development of industry and the close confinement of people in factory and workshop and in grossly inadequate houses created medical problems of widespread urgency. Sewerage schemes, scavenging, pure water supplies, and land drainage in these conditions did more to save life than an army of doctors might achieve. Soap and water largely banished the louse and the flea, and with their retreat went cholera, plague and typhus. Within IOO years our death rate dropped from some 22 per I,ooo to 12 per I,ooo. Because of such advances in our social security we honour names like Chadwick, Kay-Shuttleworth, Engels and Shaftesbury. These and others described what they saw and drew the correct conclusions from their observations. A century after the passing of our earlier Factory Acts, Lenin had to tell the Russians, "Either Socialism will destroy the louse or the louse will destroy Socialism." The young Soviet Republics set to with a will, and in these last twenty-four years have built their Socialist State and, with it, their socialised health services. Within twenty years they have reduced their infant mortality to less than half of its previous high figure. Other vital statistics show similar trends and such figures are the measure of the medical progress of a nation.