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If a sick individual is utterly unable to leave his home, a district nurse or doctor will visit him. Otherwise, every patient must go to his neighborhood dispensary where he is given a thorough medical inspection. If he needs special attention, he is sent to a central polyclinic or to a general or special hospital. Astonishing is ''the vast provision of convalescent home and sanatorium accommodation, probably larger in proportion to population than in any other civilized country." Health officials are making especially strenuous efforts to "liquidate"' tuberculosis and venereal disease. In all regions are special institutions for the treatment and cure of both.
In the main, the Russian can choose his own doctor within his own district. Doctors can usually choose the districts in which they want to practice. A doctor may practice as a specialist, after passing stiff examinations, and thereby get a slightly higher income from the government. He may practice privately (only 10% do) after his four or six-hour daily stint for the state. Education of doctors and nurses is below U. S. par, but improving. Pure research is encouraged.*
Commissar of Health Mikhail Fedorovich Vladimirsky told the inquisitors emphatically that in the U. S. S. R.† "medical aid is given without payment to all workers and peasants, who form the bulk of the population. For the rest, the desire is to serve all gratuitously but hitherto they have not been included in the general service, the first call being for the workers. Thus in a dispensary an intellectual will have to wait until all the workers have been treated."
Commissar Vladimirsky thrilled Sir Arthur and Mr. Kingsbury with the terrors of his life. At 22 (he is 60 now) he was exiled for pre-Communist revolutionary activities against Tsardom. He shared in the "Decembrist" uprising of 1905, was arrested and emigrated "under pressure." In France he practiced medicine, astonished villagers by occasionally treating them free. He was at Lenin's side and Trotsky's during the terrible days of 1917 when the Bolsheviks took command of Russia. No one is more authentically Russian than he, no one more authentically of the Party.
In conclusion, Sir Arthur Newsholme and John Adams Kingsbury approve the Soviet plan of free, or nearly free, medicine for almost everybody. They point out that "in every civilized country medicine has become more than half socialized . . . and, except in Britain and America, nearly all hospital treatment is a state service. Even in these two countries it is to a very great extent a state service. . . . In all countries west of the U. S. S. R., total official bulk larger than total private medical activities. . . . Other countries may well envy Soviet Russia's elaborately centralized Government . . . in that it has been able to brush aside all past complexities and to initiate a nearly universal national medical service on unified lines, untrammeled by such complications as exist in western Europe and America."
* Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).