U. S. doctors last week received a close-up report on state Medicine in finest flower. Although the reporters, slim Sir Arthur Newsholme of England and portly Secretary John Adams Kingsbury of the U. S. Milbank Memorial Fund, were biased in favor of state conduct of medicine in general when they visited Russia last year, they were willing to find faults. They found few, they report in Red Medicine.* Those few are mainly due, they believe, to the vast territory and population which Soviet State medicine is trying to cover. Principal findings:
The indisputable right-of-way through Soviet life belongs to the production of farm goods, industrial goods and children. When a child succeeds in getting born his after-care is guaranteed by the state. Mothers are encouraged to have their children nurtured and trained by the state. Working women, and 70% of Soviet women between the ages of 18 and 45 do work, place their children in day nurseries. Among the Soviets these institutions serve as quotidian orphan asylums. When a woman brings her child to a nursery for keeping while she works, the child is given a physical examination, a bath and a clean uniform. If ill in any way, the child is segregated. All the children have individual towels, drinking cups, tooth brushes. All are taught young how to care for themselves. In 1932, there were 3,000,000 Russian children in such nurseries. Concerning this system the reporters comment: "In a good home in which a mother gives intelligent as well as loving care she gives more than can be obtained in full measure otherwise. . . . In the present circumstances of Russia, including not only the industrial occupation of mothers, but the defective housing conditions, [nurseries] undoubtedly are doing highly beneficent work."
A woman need have no more than one child unless she wants to. Except for her first pregnancy, she may have an abortion performed at any time during the first two and a half months of term. Curetting without anesthesia is preferred to drugs. The doctor "is recommended to discourage a woman from abortion if there are no social, economic or medical reasons for it, and particularly if she has fewer than three children, or has adequate means for supporting another child." Usually there is no charge for the abortion, or at the most 40 rubles ($20). The operation occupies three to five minutes. Each patient stays in the hospital three days, refrains from work ten more days. Mortality is trivial.
If a woman goes through with a conception, she has continuous, free prenatal care; gets six to eight weeks off from work, with pay before and after delivery; receives a bonus while nursing.
As projected, and to a noteworthy extent realized, every doctor in Soviet Russia is a state official "and the practice of medicine is concentrated in dispensaries, polyclinics and hospitals in which the individual doctor is never an isolated unit, but is in systematic touch with every branch of medicine."