(In the official Instructions for fighting the flu issued by the Kharkov regional public health authorities it says in the Russian text: “The patient must be kept in bed,” but in the Ukrainian text: “The patient must be at the bedside.”)
Left panel: Treatment in Russian
Right panel: Treatment in Ukrainain
(Perets, Kharkiv, 1928)
(Newspapers report there is no disinfection station in Kharkiv)
Experienced flea (to young one): “I’ve drunk my share of ‘nice blood’… And how did I manage? I didn’t bother with the district’s healthy types. Do it like that, son. You will also experience a good life and a nice old age.”
(Perets, Kharkiv, 1928)
“What did you find with the patient Petrov?”
“Aside from a great desire to go to a resort, nothing.”
(We’ll include this on a technicality, since there is a public health poster about typhus in the background. More remarkable is the quasi-Cubist style of the artist, Semyon Zaltser, a prolific caricaturist working in Odessa. See also Zaltser’s “Medicine and life.”)
(Perets, Kharkiv, 1928)
“In filthy residences any contagion can take root for a long time.” “Filth and uncleanliness are one of most important causes of our illnesses.” Detail from an educational poster by the Ukrainian People’s Commissariat of Health, 1920. (Russian State Library)
Bugs bearing bags of infectious bacteria. “Everyone to war with disease-bearing insects.” Soviet Ukrainian Commissariat of People’s Health, 1920.
(Russian State Library)
“A filthy man is a hotbed of lice and fleas. Lice transmit the typhus contagion and relapsing fever, and fleas infect us with smallpox and plague.” (Ukrainian People’s Commissariat of Health, 1920) A pity that Soviet didacticism in service to public health still managed to send mixed messages about class. (Russian State Library)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 