Introducing Health Matters, A Virtual Lecture Series on Medicine, Illness, and Public Health
Join us via Zoom on November 4th for the first lecture of this new Jordan Center series devoted to the interdisciplinary study of medicine, illness, and public health. Health Matters explores the multiple dimensions of medicine and health at play in the pre-Petrine, Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet contexts: as a site of state policy, demographic concerns, body politics, surveillance, expertise, biopower, and healing cultures, as well as the experiences of disease, illness, and disability and their representations in art, literature, and media. We hope that Health Matters will enhance exchanges between scholars from such diverse fields as anthropology, history, medical humanities, politics, public health, and sociology, and facilitate attention to such matters in our teaching and research.
Please join us for the inaugural presentation:
This event will be hosted on Zoom only. Please register for the Zoom meeting.
Stalin’s labour camps – the notorious Gulag system – were places of injustice, suffering, and mass mortality. The Gulag exploited prisoners, forcing them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, 18 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 these camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses, and paramedics – about 40 per cent of whom were themselves prisoners.
While scholars of the Gulag have long been aware that medical facilities existed in the camps and knew about their work through some of the most vivid of prisoner memoirs, they have avoided systematic study of Gulag medicine. Explaining the paradox of medical care in places of mass morbidity and mortality was daunting; and the great chronicler of the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had simply dismissed Gulag medicine as complicit with Stalinist inhumanity.
In The Gulag Doctors Healey endeavours to understand the people who worked in the camp hospitals. Reading biographies and memoirs by doctors, paramedics, and nurses, and comparing what they experienced with what the archives of local and central Gulag administrators recorded, he looks beyond Solzhenitsyn’s condescension at how this service functioned and evolved. This lecture introduces the principal arguments of the book, demonstrating how Gulag medicine was not as detached from civilian Soviet medicine as Solzhenitsyn claimed, and how medics walked a line between the ‘sovereign power’ of the camp commandants and bureaucrats, and the ‘disciplinary power' of the medical world.
Dan Healey is Emeritus Professor of Modern Russian History, University of Oxford. A historian of gender, sexuality, and medicine in Russia and the Soviet Union, he has written extensively on the relationship between medical experts and power in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. His books include Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001); Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (DeKalb, 2009) reissued as a paperback, 2022; and Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London, 2017). With Frances L. Bernstein and Christopher Burton, he co-edited Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, Science (DeKalb, 2010).
Health Matters Advisory Board: Frances Bernstein (fb37@nyu.edu), Cynthia Buckley (cynbuck@umich.edu), Melissa Miller (mmiller@colby.edu), Michele Rivkin-Fish (mrfish@unc.edu)