Sketch About Doctors

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Most of the doctors in Russia at the beginning of the last century enjoyed the love and respect of the common people, despite the general distrust of the Russian people to medicine, hospitals, and in particular to doctors, as “masters after all”. Nevertheless, in the end, most of the doctors, with a few sad exceptions, skillfully earn the respect and even love of the people. The prisoners are especially warm to their doctors. “You don’t need fathers,” they answered questions when someone went to the hospital.

Although already in "Crime and Punishment" by F. Dostoevsky - the doctor Zosimov - "a tall and fat man, with a puffy and colorless pale; a clean-shaven face, with blond straight hair, glasses, with a large gold ring on a finger swollen with grease, "and all this at twenty-seven, is outlined as" slow ", as if lethargic and at the same time learnedly cheeky, with a claim, however, strenuously concealed by him.

In “The Brothers Karamazov” (the same F. Dostoevsky), a Moscow celebrity doctor who came to Ilya looks a lot like modern doctors. What is the advice ״ luminaries ״, despite the surrounding beggarly situation, “now, not a bit longer” send Ilya to Sirrakuzy, the patient’s sister to the Caucasus, and his mother, first to the Caucasus, and then “immediately” to Paris, to the hospital of a psychiatrist Lepeletier.

In “The Brothers Karamazov,” the devil, in a conversation with Ivan Karamazov, speaks about medicine:,, they know how to recognize the disease perfectly, they will tell you the whole disease as if on fingers, well, but they cannot cure it. , and you will die, then you will quite know from what disease you died!”Again, this way of sending them to specialists: we, they say, only recognize, but go to such a specialist, he will cure it. I'll tell you, the old doctor who treated all diseases has disappeared, now there are only specialists and everything is published in the newspapers. Sick your nose, they send you to Paris: there, they say, a European specialist treats noses. When you come to Paris, he will examine your nose: I will tell you, only the right nostril can be cured, because I cannot treat the left nostrils, this is not my specialty, but go after me to Vienna, where a special specialist will heal your left nostril”.

Modern medicine is based on specialization, which is a natural result of the rapid progressive growth of certain medical branches, and as they did not know how to treat, they did not learn … One would like to exclaim with the words of the same Dostoevsky: “Oh, beware of medical celebrities! They were all mad with conceit and arrogance; will kill you. Always choose an average doctor, some modest German, because, I swear, Germans, as doctors, are better than Russians, I testify to you, I am a Slavophile!”(And I am a Russian doctor - I would like to add on my own !!!).

In general, the same Dostoevsky outlined his attitude to medicine in his letter to Gerasimova, where he advises her to “prepare herself for a medical activity, more useful than the dark and insignificant role of some paramedic, grandmother and drug:“… you rush to the local medical courses … I would positively advise you against enrolling in them. Not the slightest education is given there, moreover, something worse happens. And what is it that you will someday be a grandmother or a medicine?..

We have people even with great talents, Sechenov for example, in essence a person who is uneducated and knows little outside of his subject. He has no idea about his opponents (philosophers), and therefore by his scientific conclusions, he is more harmful than useful. Dostoevsky advises Gerasimova to continue her education in university courses on Vasilievsky Island. “This is not just the Medical Academy, you are not waiting for the career of a midwife, who could scare him (the father of Gerasimova Yu.), Quite naturally, as if I were scared for my daughter, as well.would like my daughter to improve her education and useful human activities, not demotion.

Here I graduated from the military medical academy at the insistence of my father and in the continuation of the family dynasty, and therefore it is even more difficult for modern doctors to treat me - neither add nor subtract …

So I received a medical education in order to understand at least a little in medicine and have a better chance of recovery.