What kind of medical care does Ivan Ivanovich get if he is wounded? Outside Ivan Ivanovich's Russia, few facts on this subject were known until last fortnight. Then 1) a seven-man commission of U.S. and British doctors began to tell what they saw on a visit to the Soviet Union last summer, and 2) the first issue appeared of the American Review of Soviet Medicine, a bimonthly which will translate and digest Russian medical literature.
No Pampering. The doctors, four from Britain, two from the U.S. (Colonel Elliot Carr Cutler and Colonel Loyal Davis), one from Canada, visited hospitals in Moscow and at the Vyazma front, talked with surgeons and patients. They were enthusiastic about Russian medical efficiency, though for diplomatic reasons all refused to be quoted directly. But highlights from their trip have been reported in their speeches and interviews and in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal:
> Russia, which was once short of ambulances, now has mobile hospitals at the rear and even right behind the lines.
>The Russian system often makes it possible for one doctor to follow a case from the operating room all the way to its cure. (But, the Russians explain, a switch in surgeons usually causes no trouble, as surgical procedure has been standardized in a series of Red Army handbooks.)
>Soldiers get medical discharges from the Red Army with very little red tape.
>Red doctors manage to function even behind German lines, secretly patch many guerrillas.
> The Red Army's inspector general (with the rank of brigadier general) is a woman.
>Russian nurses have to be able to turn their hand to almost anything. The commission saw some of them putting up a new hospital ward in their spare time. One nurse fitted a window frame while they watched.
> Mental casualties are almost unknown in the Red Army. The doctors claim that this mental health is due to lack of pampering of the wounded, high morale among the unwounded.
No Ineptitude, No Magic. The visiting surgeons made it clear that there is neither ineptitude nor magic in Russian surgery. Russians, they said, excelled U.S. and British doctors in some respects, were not so good in others ("We all observe the same principles and differ only in the details"). Some of these "details" from the doctors' reports and the new Review suggest that Russia's doctors have few inhibitions :
> Russian surgeons use more whole blood than plasma for transfusions. They can do this because the blood-giving population is near the front. The blood is preserved by a special underground storage method, is thrown away if unused within three weeks.
> Most surgeons in other countries are chary of interfering with a wound more than ten hours old, but Red doctors do not hesitate to operate even if a wound has gone ten days or so. They merely make sure to keep it open.