Medical humanities as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry has emerged in recent decades. It focuses on the diverse human experiences of illness and healing—or the failure to cure—among patients, their medical providers, their fellows, and the larger society. It complements the hard-science of diagnosis and treatment by redirecting attention back to the human persons who suffer and who try to ease that suffering. Although Russianists have not appeared at the forefront in the development of medical humanities, this volume demonstrates rich scholarship and the potential for more.
This book contains nine chapters on a variety of topics, and an informative introduction that explains and justifies medical humanities as a field. In the introduction, Konstantin Starikov and Melissa L. Miller note that in Russia today, as in other countries, medical students benefit from the study of humanities. It helps them to reconnect with the humanity of their patients, to process their own emotional reactions to the life-and-death situations they encounter in medical practice, and to affirm ethical imperatives in their professional work. Two chapters in this volume directly concern the applicability of medical humanities to the education for future doctors. Jonathan McFarland and Irina Markovina examine the teaching of medical humanities at Sechenov University, describing the students’ positive responses. They urge the broader implementation of such courses, pointing out how it fosters “critical thinking, the importance of empathy and diversity, a global vision of health, disease, and illness, professionalism, [and] communication abilities” (37). Konstantin Starikov reports the results of his survey of American and Canadian medical schools to see whether they integrate medical humanities with an explicitly Russian focus into their curriculum. The survey reveals that collaboration between medical schools and their Slavist colleagues does not occur frequently—not surprising, but still disappointing. Yet, as Starikov points out, Slavic scholars have the potential to make a significant contribution to medical education particularly by drawing on their expertise in the works of Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov—both major Russian literary figures who were themselves trained as medical doctors.
Several other chapters concern the presentation of doctors and their patients in Russian literary works. Melissa Miller examines how Chekhov and Bulgakov translated their own disturbing experiences as physicians into their literary works. She avers the value to medical practitioners to study these examples of “narrative medicine” “to encourage creativity and self-reflection in the physician” (99). Jehanne Gheith explores how two novels, one Russian and one American, present patients with memory loss not as victims but rather as persons still true to themselves and venturing into a world invisible to “healthy” people. Gheith recounts how the insights she gained from these literary works, which she analyzes in her role as a professor of Russian literature, informs her dual career as a social worker engaged in hospice care. Two chapters approach the doctor/patient relationship as depicted in Russian literary works from a different angle, explicating how the authors employ it as a metaphor for the illness of society itself. Natalia Vygovskaia studies the opus of Vikentii Veresaev, a physician-cum-litterateur, with particular consideration of his novel The Deadlock, set in the era of the Russian Civil War. Angela Brintlinger looks at the literary depictions of hospital wards in the works of Chekhov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Julia Voznesenskaia, and (more briefly) Maksim Osipov. In these stories, the hospital ward appears as a place in which the patients come to greater awareness of themselves and the ills of their society, despite the intent of the administrators of the institution, including the doctors.
Three chapters arise from the discipline of history, and are less concerned with the inner experiences of doctors and patients. Evgeniya L. Panova and Maria S. Tutorskaya survey how medical doctors in the nineteenth century raised money to support hospitals and medical schools. They did this in part from personal commitment to charitable giving and in part from necessity, because governmental funding was insufficient. While the authors present these physician-philanthropists as a model for contemporary counterparts, they do not specify how this past history can be applied productively to the complex problems and ethics of funding medical education and care in the world today. Maria P. Kuzybaeva describes collections of anatomical specimens, with emphasis on bones, either natural or reproductions. At one time, such collections played a central role in the teaching of medical students, but they have now been largely replaced by computer models. Kuzybaeva wants to see the collections preserved rather than discarded, although she does not enunciate reasons why they remain valuable. In his chapter, Frederick H. White shows how the Russian woman physician Praskovia Tarnovskaia conducted groundbreaking research on the physiology of women criminals, and how her findings informed the better-known criminological works of west European experts. Thus, he implicitly challenges the long-established view that Russian medical science tended to imitate, rather than to lead, the west. Of course, he recognizes that Tarnovskaia's central idea, that a person's criminality can be determined through their physiognomy, has now been disproven. Still, he suggests that Tarnovskaia's research can be read against the grain to document the real causes of female lawbreaking.
While each of the chapters has considerable value on its own, the volume does not present a summation of the state of Russian medical humanities as a field; the editors decided against undertaking such a Herculean task. Some parts of the volume demonstrate explicitly how Russian medical humanities can benefit health care providers; others leave it to readers to make these connections themselves. Thus, the purpose of the volume as laid out in the Introduction remains only partially fulfilled. Nonetheless, scholars of Russian studies who are interested in health-related topics can gain much from this book.
