“Isn’t it a sin to laugh at sick people? - you ask. “Especially if the poor fellows are suffering from stomach pain?” After all, it is with the oddities and absurd situations that patients with suspected intestinal infections find themselves in, squeezed into a stuffy ward of an infectious diseases hospital, that Alla Bossart begins her novel. The humor is not unprintable, but rather harsh. “Unbalanced gastrointestinal men” - one might say, the softest of all expressions. Alla Bossart presents a whole gallery of satirical portraits, not inferior in expressiveness to the types of Gogol or Saltykov-Shchedrin, but adjusted for modern Russian reality. Using the technique of the grotesque and thickening the colors, the author, of course, , comes from very specific domestic realities: Solzhenitsyn even noticed the similarities between Russian hospitals and prisons, and the textbook analogy of Russia and Ward No. 6 (read, a regime “powerless” institution) constantly slips through the text with hints of varying degrees of transparency.