My guest said this was the best meal he had had since leaving America. “Why don’t you come back?” I asked.
“I couldn’t get in.”
“Would you if you could?”
“Just give me a chance!”
I suppose it was inevitable that in such a social upheaval many suffered. I called upon Dr. Peter Tutyshkin, who had tried to attend our 1925 Conference in New York, but had arrived too late. As was the case with most professional men of his years, he had been of the old aristocracy. He and his wife and two daughters, both physicians, had owned a beautiful home. Now the thousands of volumes of what had formerly comprised his fine medical and scientific library had been taken away, and he and his wife slept and ate in the room which had contained them. He was margined and rationed to the last degree, and I could feel his humiliation at having so little food that he could not offer us a cup of tea.
While we were in Moscow, the Eddy party and the select six whom Louis Fischer was piloting, crossed our path. Fischer, a Russian living in Moscow and writing for the Nation, published in the United States, invited Grant and me to go along with them to meet the Secretary of the Commissariat of Public Health, Dr. Kaminsky. We went up a wide open stairway like that of a courthouse and into a spacious room with high windows running from floor to ceiling in French fashion and a huge banquet table laden with the invariable afternoon tea.
Dr. Kaminsky addressed us. “Our worst heritage from the Old Regime was in the field of medicine. The main task before us is to unite science and practice. Our medicine is a form of social insurance, our medical policy based on prevention. We are not interested in profit, only service.”
The Russians had been kind and had grasped very quickly any improvement suggested to them, even accepting criticism with great tolerance. Aware of this, when Dr. Kaminsky paused for questions, Grant inquired about doctors entering private practice.
“As Russia builds up public health work,” was the answer, “more doctors will be able to find room for private practice if they so desire.”
Sherwood Eddy slipped me a note. “Here’s your opportunity to bring up birth control.”