Book by Dr. V.P. Smolnikov - autobiographical notes telling about his life and medical practice in China in the forties and fifties of the 20th century. The book is intended for a wide range of readers.

Viktor Prokofievich Smolnikov (1914 - 1994) was born and lived for many years in China. He graduated from the French Aurora University in Shanghai, and then worked as a doctor in an English company for fourteen years. In 1946, after numerous refusals, Viktor Smolnikov, by this time a professor of medicine, was finally granted Soviet citizenship, and in 1954 in Among those who agreed to go to explore virgin lands, he was allowed to enter the USSR. After a year and a half of working as a doctor in a hospital in the village of Ubinskoye, Novosibirsk region, V. Smolnikov, as a specialist in the field of anesthesiology and the author of the book “Simple Ether Anesthesia,” received an invitation to Moscow to the Thoracic Research Institute Surgery of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, and in 1960 he began working as the head of the laboratory of anesthesiology at the Research Institute of Experimental and Clinical Oncology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (now the N.N. Blokhin Russian Cancer Research Center). Here he continued his professional activities until 1971, when he was forced to leave work for health reasons. In 1976, V. Smolnikov finished a book of memoirs, “Notes of a Shanghai Doctor,” and then wrote another book, completely independent in content, “The Diary.” of a Shanghai Physician", but in English. Both books were based on materials from the diary that Viktor Prokofievich constantly kept throughout the entire period of his life in China. The author’s attempts to publish the book in the USSR in the seventies and eighties turned out to be fruitless due to its “apoliticality” - this is how the workers of those publishing houses motivated their refusals , which the author referred to. At the same time, the book contains a number of little-known historical facts and interesting pictures of the life and morals of Shanghai, this “Asian Babylon”, during its heyday, and then the change of four regimes. And first of all, we are talking about the life of foreign Shanghai, its international settlement. The author’s keen observation, his ironic view of the events that happened to him and around him, his cheerful disposition and sense of humor make the book interesting.

Natalia Smolnikova