Enveloped Lives: Practicing Health and Care in Lithuania.

This article analyzes informal medical payments that the majority of Lithuanians give or feel compelled to give to doctors before or after treatment. It focuses on how patients and their caretakers encounter, practice, and enact informal payments in health care and how these payments create a reality of health care that is not limited to an economic rationality. Within such a frame, rather than being considered a gift or bribe, it conceptualizes these little white envelopes as a practice of health and care. The article shows how an envelope of money given to a doctor transcends the material patient-doctor transaction and emerges as a productive force for coping with illness, medical encounters, and misfortunes.

"In my opinion, work would be in first place and family in second": young women's imagined gender-work relations in post-Soviet Lithuania.

This article explores young women's orientation to work and motherhood in the post-communist context of radical socio-economic transformation in Europe. Based on a qualitative-explorative study into meanings of work and unemployment among young people in post-Soviet Lithuania, the paper introduces an empirically grounded classification of imagined gender-work arrangements. The single patterns of the classification are based on the three configurations of work and motherhood, work and partnership, and work and provision. The findings inform the reconstruction of the 'landscape' of imagined gendered adulthoods in Europe as well as the analysis of emerging gender relations under conditions of rapid social change.

Health care in the Vilna ghetto.

The distinguished medical tradition of Jewish Vilna was maintained during the ghetto years, 1941-1943. The large number of physicians and other medical personnel in the Vilna ghetto, and the inclusion of the prewar Jewish hospital within its boundaries, made possible an effective medical establishment that worked closely with the ghetto administration. In addition to the hospital, clinic, and other medical institutions, the highly organized Sanitary-Epidemiological Section oversaw the strict enforcement of sanitary regulations. An intensive educational campaign spread health information among the population. These efforts overcame the serious health dangers that characterized the early weeks of the ghetto, and for the remainder of the existence of the ghetto prevented outbreaks of epidemic diseases that otherwise might have resulted in catastrophic death rates.