Sighet Memorial: Room 72 - Medicine in Prison

One of the social categories hardest hit by communist repression was that of physicians and medical students. More than 1.5% of the total number of Romania’s political prisoners had taken the Hippocratic Oath. The reason for this disproportionate number can be deduced from the “Medicine in Prison” room. Given the humanist character of their profession, and given the professional oath that obliged them to treat all patients with equal compassion (even if they were “enemies of the people”), physicians soon became a favourite target of those who wanted to liquidate every last trace of opposition and non-adherence to their goals. On the other hand, given the culture and romanticism of physicians in those days, they were also unreservedly active in the democratic parties and refused to adopt communist medical jargon, which tended to “translate” medical notions, phenomena and even illnesses into a strange Soviet idiom, rejecting all that was western.