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E-book Soviet Nightingales : Care under Communism

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Penilaian

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In 1922 an in terest ing exchange took place in Moscow’s Botkin hospital concerning a “delicate and even shy” patient who had just had a bullet extracted from his neck and was recovering in ward no. 44.1The patient wanted to know all about his nurse, the other patients, and the medical personnel. He even asked the nurse why she looked so “bad” and ques-tioned the professor tending to him about why this nurse was “working day and night, without rest.” He noticed the physical toll nursing work took on people. Fi nally, he wanted to know how he could thank this nurse who had been taking care of him. The inquisitive patient was none other than the leader of the world communist revolution, Vladimir I. Lenin. Within a few days the nurse who had tirelessly taken care of Lenin received a resort pass to the Crimea, issued by Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko on the direct in-struction of her thoughtful patient.2 The busy leader, it seemed, cared about nurses. The account was in a 1980 book on Lenin and Soviet public health, and the moral of the story was that the Soviet state cared about its nurses.Lenin’s nurse— Ekaterina Alekseevna Nechkina— was later featured in the journal Nurse. By the time her story appeared in a 1948 issue of the publica-tion, Nechkina had already accumulated some thirty- seven years’ work expe-rience. Born into a working- class family, she had the right class credentials, but life was far from easy. Orphaned at just fifteen years old, Nechkina moved from the provinces to Moscow to be under the guardianship of her uncle, a doctor in the Staro- Ekaterinskaia (Old Catherine) hospital. She joined the Sisters of Mercy school attached to the Aleksandrovskaia nursing community and grad-uated in 1911.3 After that she entered the Soldatenkovskaia hospital’s surgical department ( later the Botkin hospital), where she remained for fifteen years. A “thoughtful, dedicated” worker, she was promoted from ward nurse to se-nior nurse in 1916. As testament to her high standing, she had the “ great honor” of caring for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in April 1922. In the mid-1920s the hospi-tal appointed her head nurse of its new surgical building.4Nechkina was valued as a “highly cultured” worker who had good relations with her patients. She possessed the typical attributes of other Soviet workers—she constantly “worked on herself ” to improve her education and was an ex-ample to others.5 We do not know what exactly happened to Nechkina during the revolution, but like so many other nurses who had trained prior to the revo-lution she continued her hospital work. Her sound working- class background no doubt helped in shielding her from dismissal or arrest. The fact that she had trained in a tsarist nursing community did not negatively affect her career; if anything, she was valued more because of the training and discipline she acquired before the revolution.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

902 GRA s

Penerbit

USA : Cornell University Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

335 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781501762611

Klasifikasi

902

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Miscellany of History

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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