Health Care
There is a medical clinic at the Qincheng Prison with both doctors and nurses assigned. There is also a dental clinic, built of brick and stone, located further away from the main prison buildings. In addition to treating prisoners for ordinary illness, semi-annual physical checks are also performed. High-ranking prisoners could receive more frequent checks depending on their health conditions. Both the high-ranking and low-ranking prisoners receive better health care than ordinary citizens outside, and this situation has not changed since the first day when the prison was established.
For important high-ranking prisoners, the doctors at Qincheng Prison do not have the final decision making authority on how to treat the prisoners for their illness. It is often a political decision determined by the top brass of the communist regime. For example, in the autumn of 1969 during Cultural Revolution, under Kang Sheng's order, an important high-ranking prisoner, Shi Zhe (师哲), the former personal secretary and personal Russian translator of Mao Zedong was jailed in Qincheng prison. He was scheduled to have an operation to remove a so-called cancer. However, doctors determined that there was no cancer at all, but Kang Sheng insisted on giving Shi Zhe (师哲) an operation, and the completely unnecessary operation was carried out to fulfill the political task.
Read more about this topic: Qincheng Prison
Famous quotes containing the words health and/or care:
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)