Periodicals of the Late 19th – and early 20th Century about Health Care for Uman Region Population

Abstract

The relevance of the issue of health and health care in the late 19^th – and early 20^th century is determined by the need to study historical experience in this sphere of social and cultural life. The fact that the local self-government bodies so-called zemstvos also were responsible for medical care makes the research more relevant. And in the current conditions of decentralization in Ukraine zemstvo’s experience of providing health care should be studied and taken into account. After all, the united territorial communities establishing in the process of decentralization reform can use the main benefits of zemstvo’s medicine – the preventive health care and control of infectious diseases and the maintenance of a medical institutions network.

«Zarya» and «Kievlyanin». The putting out of those newspapers coincided with the period of zemstvos on the Ukrainian lands, and therefore many publications on their pages were devoted to zemstvo’s medicine.

The realization of the goal implied the following tasks: searching for publications describing the state of health care of Uman district population; systematization of information applying problem-chronological method to create general representation of the state of medical care; the analyzing of the historical retrospective of the state of providing medical services to the population of Uman district; finding out the role of county zemstvo in providing medical assistance to the residents of the region.

The goal of this paper is to systematize information on the state of health and medical care of Uman District residents, taken from the publications of the Kyiv newspapers.

Publications of Kyiv newspapers «Zarya» and «Kievlyanin» of the late 19^th – and early 20^th century and sources describing the activities of Uman county zemstvo have made it possible to conclude that the state of health care evolved from low to satisfactory. 25 publications found in the most popular Kyiv newspapers give a fairly complete picture of the health and level of health care of the population of the region. The systematization of information from newspaper publications makes it possible to conclude that the existence of a hospital in Uman since 1873 and the establishment of an outpatients' clinic in 1883 did not solve the problem of medical care for the population of Uman region. The peasants did not have money to pay for medical services, ignored the need to see a doctor, and therefore epidemics, treatment by old sorceresses and various types of self-taught healers were of common nature. With the establishing of zemstvos, health care began to improve: since 1904, all hospitals in the Province were farmed out to zemstvo institutions and zemstvos considered the development of medicine to be one of the main tasks. Uman county zemstvo founded hospitals in the county and founded a medical institution in Uman. Thus, with the establishing of zemstvos, the level of public health care began to increase.

The novelty and practical importance of this paper are determined by the formulation of the problem and the widening of the social history source base. The found publications can be introduced into the scientific circulation both to characterize the activity of zemstvos and to add new materials to local history.

The prospects of the study are in the context of a comprehensive analysis of the newspapers «Zarya» and «Kievlyanin» publications concerning the population’s state of health in the second half of the 19^th – beginning of the 20^th century and about the activities of zemstvos to create a health care system for residents of Kyiv Province.