ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn descended from an intellectual Cossack family. He was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, a spa town in the Northern Caucasus. Tashkent. Solzhenitsyn believes that the nature of his "tumor" was established later, presumably from a biopsy specimen, but how he was cured is not revealed. Judging from his own description of the available cancer therapy in this hospital, as described in his semi-autobiographical novel, Cancer Ward, it would have to have been a radiosensitive neoplasm. The novel was written in the 1960s, barred from publication in the Soviet Union, smuggled out of the country and published abroad. Reflecting on Solzhenitsyn's account of conditions on the Cancer Ward, it appears to be mainly of historical interest, but the suffering of cancer patients and their families remains universal.
