The Loss Clinic

Like all of Maria Voronova’s books, “The Clinic of Losses” is about doctors and their routine work, which requires enormous nervous strain. About what happens to them when the operating-room lamps go out, the workday is long over, but sleep is still impossible… Readers of Voronova already know Professor Dmitry Miller. Despite Miller’s brilliant surgical skills and male charm, nurses refuse to work with him. The book you’re holding is devoted to Miller’s relationship with Veronika Smyslovskaya—a young widow of one of the founders of Soviet military surgery.

What, at the time, made the nineteen-year-old talented medical-student marry General Smyslovsky, a man fifty years older than her? Since then, many have envied the current Veronika: both colleagues and even her older sister. But the path from envy to hatred is short—especially when the notorious “housing question” comes into the matter…