tainly could have been more wise and humane; nothing could have been more worthy of respectful consideration than such a suggestion from such a source. With what reception did it meet? I am sorry to say that it met with swift punishment. For sending this memorial to the Minister of the Interior — for venturing to intercede in behalf of physicians banished upon suspicion of political "untrustworthiness" — the Medical Society of Tver was closed and forbidden to hold further meetings, and two of its members who happened to be in the service of the state as surgeons in the Tver hospital were summarily dismissed from their places.[1]
If persons who merely suggest that exiled physicians be allowed to practise are punished in this way by the Minister of the Interior, one can imagine how exiled physicians themselves who practise without permission are punished by that minister's subordinates.
In the year 1880 there was living in the city of Kharkóf a young medical student named Nifónt Dólgopólof. He had finished his course of instruction in the medical faculty of the Kharkóf University, and was about to take his final examination, when there occurred one of the scenes of tumult and disorder that are so common in Russian universities, when a large number of students, excited by some real or fancied grievance, undertake to hold an indignation meeting in the street opposite the university buildings. In Kharkóf, on the occasion to which I refer, the disturbance became so serious that the university authorities were unable to deal with it, and a troop of mounted Cossacks was sent to break up the meeting and to disperse the mob of excited undergraduates. Irritated by the resistance that they encountered, and determined to clear the street at all hazards, the Cossacks rode through the crowd of hooting students, striking right and left at random with the short,
- ↑ My authorities for the facts of this case are four or five citizens of Tver, including two members of the Tver Medical Society.
