“Why do you assume you have the right to decide for someone else? Don’t you agree it’s a terrifying right, one that rarely leads to good? You should be careful. No one’s entitled to it, not even doctors.”
“But doctors are entitled to that right—doctors above all,” exclaimed Dontsova with deep conviction. By now she was really angry. “Without that right there’d be no such thing as medicine!”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that in Cancer Ward, first published in 1968. On the surface, the novel is a slice of life story set in a hospital. The semi-autobiographical central character, Oleg, is surrounded by an array of other patients undergoing treatments, mostly ineffective, for a terrifying disease. The nurses and doctors are overwhelmed, managing their frustrations with a mix of bravado and despair. The only true victor in the novel is cancer.
But the book is also a metaphor for society. Solzhenitsyn designed the metaphor to capture what was happening in the Soviet Union. But the book can also help us examine American society in the Age of COVID. Solzhenitsyn helps us understand the answer to a question that has surely crossed many minds since 2020: how did a biological disease turn into a political battle?
Read the rest at Public Discourse
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