Patient Notification and Cancer in Russia and the Soviet Union

[John Dunn]

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.
________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Lise Brody [00000059b9cfa86f-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UA.EDU]
Sent: 24 September 2014 03:06
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Patient Notification and Cancer in Russia and the Soviet Union

I had an agonizing experience in the early 80s when I worked as an interpreter for new immigrants at a health center in Boston.  When an older man was diagnosed with lymphoma, my supervisor, a Soviet immigrant, told me to avoid the word "cancer" and simply tell the patient that he had "abnormal cells."  His wife pleaded with me, practically on her knees, not to tell her husband he had cancer.  I still remember her insistence that if he heard that diagnosis, he would give up on life (never mind that lymphoma is slow growing, and he was more likely to die of something else long before it became fatal).  But the American doctor explicitly insisted that I not only tell him, but that I specifically use the word "cancer,"  asking me repeatedly, in the presence of the patient and his wife, if I had done so.  It was horrible for everybody.  That incident threw into relief the cultural differences around medicine at the time.




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