Purpose Statement - Healthcare in Soviet Gulag Camps

The audience I'm trying to talk to in this paper is the community of doctors and healthcare workers. I want to inform and educate them about how the doctors in the Soviet Gulag camps treated their patients, as well as the facility conditions. This paper will discuss the lack of medicine and healthcare in the Gulag. It will also help describe some of the things doctors did to treat patients and the medicine they use. I will discuss how the doctors did not care for the patients well being or health. The doctors acted selfishly and unethically by letting the prisoners suffer. Also, it will cover the topic of doctors falsifying documents and death certificates. These falsified documents make it hard to get an approximate number of deaths and illnesses in the camps since you can't trust the records. Along with talking about the poor healthcare, I will cover the conditions and causes of the illnesses if the workers. The poor living conditions and the poor food quality were both huge contributing factors in the health of the prisoners. Along with discussing the bad doctors I will talk about the very rare, good doctor. Though there weren't very many of these in the camps they did exist and some wanted to contribute to the horrible lives of the prisoners by helping them in their health and making them better. This paper will cover many topics on the healthcare in the Gulag, and touch on some of the minor problems. I think that the general public should read this as well to become educated on how people were being treated.