Choroby i ich leczenie w stalinowskich więzieniach i obozach w Polsce w latach 1944–1956
Diseases and their treatment in Stalinist prisons and camps in Poland in the years 1944–1956

Summary/Abstract: In post-war Stalinist prisons and labour camps in Poland (to 1956) several diseases and ailments were treated with the help of the so-called folk or traditional medicine. Inmates, with all means at their disposal, tried to treat themselves as efficiently as possible, for example curing scabies with their own urine, a toothache and scurvy with garlic, or hyperacidity with chalk and lime scratched off walls. They could also soothe the itching in infestation with lice and ailments in furunculosis. But they could do nothing in the case of epidemic of typhus, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases. Only in 1945 ca. five thousand inmates went down with typhus. In the labour camp of Świętochłowice– Zgodna at least 1855 inmates died of diseases. Surgeons, feldshers, and other medical personnel were helpless in the face of diseases and epidemics in prisons and camps. Medical treatment, when it was possible, was hampered by dirt, insects, chronic shortages of food and medicines. This was further enhanced by a small number of hospital beds, but first of all by insufficient number of medical staff. Only a handful of surgeons decided to treat inmates.

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