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Humanitarian sciences in Siberia

2019 year, number

POPULATION HEALTH AND HEALTH DEVELOPMENT IN SIBERIA IN THE LATE XIX CENTURY - 1940

M. A. Semenov
Institute of History SB RAS, Nikolaev str., 8, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation, 630090
Keywords: здравоохранение, здоровье, медицина, Сибирь, заболеваемость, смертность, health care, health, medicine, Siberia, morbidity, mortality

Abstract

The article attempts to highlight the main trends of health care development in Siberia and its impact on Siberians’ health. This period is characterized as the time of forming the health care system in Siberia. Based on the analysis of progressing medical network, staffing, financing health care, the author concludes on the insufficiency of health care development rate during the Imperial period. The emerging Siberian medicine’s success was quickly dashed under the Civil war conditions. After the Civil war, the state resumed active measures to develop medical care for population. However, the Siberians’ health of that period was far from ideal. Infectious morbidity was high, it firmly occupied the first place in the structure of death causes. In the early 1930s, famine struck Siberia. Peasants exhausted by malnutrition left for cities massively. Such a sharp increase of urban population was not provided with the adequate level of social sphere development. All three factors necessary for the successful development of epidemics coincided in these circumstances: presence of a susceptible and malnourished population, active migration flows, lack of sanitation. The epidemics growth in such an environment was inevitable. As a result, epidemics became the main cause of supermortality in the early 1930s. The need to overcome this severe infectious situation, the country’s economy growth led to the active health care system’s development in Siberia. Widening the medical activity affected the population health. In the second half of the 1930s, almost all infectious diseases had a clear declining dynamics. By 1940, Siberian health care had become a serious factor influencing the residents’ health.