Imagine a world where doctors don’t know they should wash their hands before surgery. Where nurses are still putting butter on burns and then wrapping them tightly in bandages (and ripping those bandages off days later to cause infections). Where vodka is given as a cure for radiation poisoning. (These are all real examples).

It was all simple stuff, that your average American high school kid knows better than. But the average doc in the USSR didn’t get it.

Why?

Because general ignorance was endemic to the system, just as it’s endemic to all large government bureaucracies. Okay, there were lots of reasons (the government also controlled the education system, the best and the brightest weren’t signing up to become doctors because there was little financial incentive, etc., etc.).

But I told my friends that if push came to shove, to just let me die in the street rather than take me into another hospital where cats were running around to clear out the rats.

God bless American medicine.