It wasn’t uncommon to leave a patient ignorant of their impending doom. This is really no different to what used to happen in Australia, for instance. The medical profession believed that information should be withheld from patients, ‘for their own good.’ They didn’t understand the technicalities and should leave the decisions to those who do. Kostoglotov believed that he had the right to choose what form and how much treatment he should have.
What was so interesting to me was the medical treatment of cancer and the attitude of the medical staff to patients and treatment. (See One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) As interesting as they were, there have been other books I’ve read that addressed this, one of them also written by Solzhenitsyn. The most fascinating aspect of Cancer Ward for me wasn’t so much the allegorical links to the Communist regime and the descriptions of life in a dictatorship. I was totally absorbed by this book’s 570 pages and despite the fact that Russian literature is often notoriously hard to read, this book definitely wasn’t. And like Solzhenitsyn, he later recovered. Kostoglotov’s life mirrors that of Solzhenitsyn in that he was imprisoned for his criticism of Stalin, and after being diagnosed with stomach cancer, was transferred from the concentration camp to a cancer ward. The story takes place in a male cancer ward of a Soviet hospital in the mid-1950’s and revolves around a number of characters, the central one being Oleg Kostoglotov. English translations were published in 1968, and although book was banned in the Soviet Union, unauthorized Russian copies were distributed in samizdat. Russian author and Nobel Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, completed his book Cancer Ward in 1966.
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