Curative Mythmaking: Children's Bodies, Medical Knowledge, and the Frontier of Health in Early Soviet Odesa
Journal: East/West Journal of Ukrainian Studies
Year: 2022

This essay explores how Soviet authorities appropriated medical knowledge derived from the treatment of a “passive” juvenile population to create a new assurance of municipal well-being in the 1920s. The attempt to control and remediate the spread of disease reflected a Bolshevik certainty in the state’s ability to confront the frontier of health by applying the dictates of modern science. Revolution and civil war brought challenge—the fractured city changed hands repeatedly until a final, tenta