HIGHER MEDICAL EDUCATION OF THE BSSR: MAIN ASPECTS OF ASSISTANCE TO PRACTICAL HEALTH CARE IN THE 1950s AND 1960s

During the period of the 1950s and 1960s, higher medical education occupied one of the key positions in the health care system of the BSSR. After overcoming the medical and sanitary consequences of the Great Patriotic war and restoring fixed assets, the BSSR health care system faced further challenges to increase the amount of medical institutions and the number of doctors, and to improve the quality of providing medical care to the population. All these and many other tasks could not be solved without the comprehensive assistance of higher medical education. The purpose of the study is to show the key stages of the development of higher medical education in the BSSR in the field of practical health care in the 1950s and 1960s. The research was carried out on the basis of archival data stored in the collections of the National Archive of the Republic of Belarus, the State Archive of Vitebsk Region, scientific and historical literature from the National Library of the Republic of Belarus, the Vitebsk Regional Library named after V. I. Lenin, as well as information already introduced into scientific parlance. Special historical methods were used in this study: historical-genetic, historical-comparative, and historical-systemic.