ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak came from an intellectual Jewish family in Moscow. In 1958 Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his important achievement in contemporary lyric poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic achievement". The important woman in Pasternak's affection was Olga Ivinskaya, who served as a model for Lara in his brilliant epic novel Doctor Zhivago, written in the years 1945 to 1954. Yuri Andreievich Zhivago is the son of a wastrel and drunkard who abandons his wife and son, squanders the considerable family fortune and finally commits suicide by throwing himself from a moving train. Pasternak makes his hero a doctor not to view the medical scene in Russia but to stress Yuri's desire to be useful to society and to allow him to witness at close range the tragedies of the civil war.
