Patient Notification and Cancer in Russia and the Soviet Union

[Alina Israeli]

1. As John Dunn pointed out, it is not just a Russian issue, in Europe it used to be the same. In France some years ago our (much older generation) friend was not told that he had cancer, only his sister was.

2. It is in part the question of the attitude towards death. Our culture (Amero–European) by and large pretends it does not happen. 

Example 1. I was asking my students what are most important words, eventually they got to любовь, they never got to жизнь and смерть. And I was teaching gender, not philosophy.
Example 2. My father (back in Russia) refused to make a will. As a friend of mine explained, from superstition, that it would accelerate or bring up death. I was too American at that point and had signed my first will a decade prior, as soon as I found out that the New York state takes half of your belongings if you have no will. What! My books!

3. There were studies done in the US that confirm the fact that not knowing that one has cancer increases survival rates. That could also mean the length of time a person lives after being diagnosed.

4. And finally I would like to mention a "novella" by I.Grekova "Перелом" where the doctor has  a remorse for not having told a patient that she was dying (and she wanted to know in order to bequeath her meager possessions, just like me and my books) and a discussion as to who has the right to know and who does not. 

Alina

On Sep 24, 2014, at 5:50 AM, John Dunn <John.Dunn at GLASGOW.AC.UK> wrote:

> In C.P. Snow's novel The Masters, published in 1951, but set in the 1930s, the Master of a Cambridge college is dying of an unnamed illness.  His family and colleagues all know that he is dying, but all are explicitly warned that on no account must the Master himself be told of his impending fate.  This makes me wonder whether the cultural difference mentioned by Lise Brody is not another example of social attitudes and conventions that were once much more widespread surviving much longer in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia than in Western Europe and North America.  I would suggest that it is also characteristic that the nature of the illness is never mentioned: until about the 1970s it was rare to talk publicly about cancer, at least in the United Kingdom.   
> 
> John Dunn.


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