Socialised Medicine in the Soviet Union

Abstract

DR. HENRY SIGERIST was the successor of his great master Sudhoff as professor of the history of medicine at Leipzig, and now occupies a similar post at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is a prolific writer of popular books on historical subjects related to medicine, and many readers of NATURE will know his books on “Man and Medicine” and is biographical account of “Great Doctors”. He has now embarked upon a survey of the medical policy of the Soviet Union, of which he appears to be a warm admirer. Indeed, it is not too much to say that he is something more than favourably disposed, and this should be borne in mind in weighing his evidence. Sidney Webb, well known as an advocate of Soviet policy, furnishes a foreword to the book, and concurs in Prof. Sigerist's view that the Soviet method is planned throughout on a scientific basis. It banks on science for its salvation. As Sidney Webb says elsewhere (1937),“it refuses to accept as knowledge or as the basis of its code of conduct any of the merely traditional beliefs and postulates about man and the universe for which no rational foundation can be found, or any of the purely subjective imaginings of the meta-physician or the theologian”. Socialised Medicine in the Soviet Union By Dr. Henry E. Sigerist. Pp. 382. (London: Victor Gollaucz, Ltd., 1937.) 15s. net.