#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. It is not known for certain why Georgy Volkov, a staff specialist of the combine’s photo information bureau, went to the Norilsk city hospital, where he took photographs in all its departments. Perhaps a booklet or some other publication was being prepared. Norilsk health care at all times has been not only the most northern one, but also one of the most highly professional.
Unfortunately, 45 years later, it is impossible to establish the names of all the doctors caught in the camera lens. However, one cannot fail to recognize the chief traumatologist of the city in the 1960s-1980s, the founder of the local school of traumatologists and orthopedists, Alexander Karpushin, who also left behind a whole medical dynasty. Thanks to Karpushin Sr., specialized medical care began to be provided on the spot, without sending patients with injuries to the region’s capital.
The photographer visited the children’s, pulmonary, neurological departments of the hospital. Georgy Volkov filmed in intensive care department, though through glass, and even in the histological laboratory, located on the first floor of the same building where the office of the city hospital chief physician Evgeny Arsentievich Klimov was located.
There is no chief doctor in the photo chronicle on January 19. But all the pathologists working at that time got into the frame. The youngest pathologist Alexander Karchava in 1976 was just starting her work in Norilsk. Alexandra continues to issue histological reports to patients and put down the last words in the history of diseases, but now – on the territory of the Oganer multidisciplinary hospital. Norilsk doctors started talking about its necessity back in the late 1960s and got it in 1994.
Read other materials of the photo project in the History spot section.
Text: Varvara Sosnovskaya, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division Archive
