Subtitle:

"Man is sick when he is in pain" : a socio-cultural history of health and illness in the Polish countryside after 1945 ; Społeczno-kulturowa historia zdrowia i choroby na wsi w Polsce Ludowej

Contributor:

Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla

Publisher:

Instytut Historii PAN

Place of publishing:

Warszawa

Description:

357 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm ; Bibliography (pages 335-350). Index. ; Summary in English. ; Wydanie II, poprawione.

Abstract:

The sphere of rural health, hygiene, attitude to the body and illness, and also the relationship between rural population and staffs of local delivery rooms and health centres have not been subjected to a thorough historical analysis. And equally seldom have analyses of the history of rural everyday life paid attention to the problem of how people living in rural areas handled their ailments and illnesses, how they perceived the sick, and whether the type of disease influenced their everyday relations and social standing of a sick person. All these problems are dealt with in the presented book. When analysing a long, forty-year period, I also pay attention to all changes in rural perception of health and sickness, to the pace of those changes and what has caused them. Some important transformations were influenced by the social and health policy of the state only to a degree. Apart of a chaotic building of rural health centres, at least to the end of 1952 and early 1953 problems of individual farmers were marginalised in an official discourse, and the countryside itself was presented as the stronghold of backwardness and superstition. The exclusion of individual farmers from a full package of the free health service was to inscribe into the contemporary Stalinist policy of the state. In actual fact, it was impossible for the Polish state to include into the free health system another several million of Poles so soon after the war if only for the lack of money, staff and buildings. To provide rural pregnant women and children of individual farmers (up to 14 years of age) with free health service negated, to a large degree, a planned and ideologised bio-policy towards the countryside. The state healthcare system introduced to the Polish countryside in the form of health centres and delivery rooms was to provide the germ of change in the sphere of rural heath culture, and at the same time a place to gather information on the state of health of people living in rural areas. A thin network of those health facilities combined with transportation problems, but also with rural people’s mental distance and distrust of the state institutions made the beginnings of those healthcare centres very difficult, which was mirrored in the low attendance as well as a still strong position of local healers and traditional forms of treatments. Some important changes were noticed as soon as the 1960s, but their scale and pace were regionally and socially differentiated. And although the changing attitude of rural people to hygiene, preventive health care measures or nutrition was influenced to a large degree by the state policy, still an important role was played by a number of other, overlapping factors, such as a generation change, universal public education, the role of mass media, spatial mobility of rural people, or urban behaviour models. The changes can be illustrated by statistics revealing steadily falling rates of infant mortality, rates of death from infectious (and social) diseases, and decreasing disparities between rural and urban living conditions. An important symptom of transformations was also a different attitude towards the sick. More and more often sick people were looking for help in their local health centres, and not at home, and less frequently they were taken ill with the so-called “traditional ailments”. Moreover, in the 1970s sanitary conditions of rural areas much improved, and this further decreased disparities between rural living conditions and state of health and urban ones. And despite the fact that sociological and anthropological analyses of the 1980s still revealed some persistent differences and biological inequalities between the country and the town, at that time they were less and less seen by the rural people themselves, who regarded a universal health care – symbolised by the existence of health facility buildings – in the categories of modernisation and advancement of the countryside.

Detailed Resource Type:

Book

Resource Identifier:

oai:rcin.org.pl:140051 ; 978-83-65880-40-6

Source:

IH PAN, call no. I.10889 ; IH PAN, call no. I.10888 Podr. ; click here to follow the link

Language:

pol

Language of abstract:

eng

Rights:

Creative Commons Attribution BY-ND 4.0 license

Terms of use:

Copyright-protected material. [CC BY-ND 4.0] May be used within the scope specified in Creative Commons Attribution BY-ND 4.0 license, full text available at: ; -

Digitizing institution:

Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Original in:

Library of the Institute of History PAS

Access:

Open