The body under the sheet, lying on the dissection table in the ‘Anatomical Theater’ exhibition hall of the Military Medical Museum, is a movie prop — a silicone doll. It was used by the film crew of the director Alexey Balabanov while working on the film ‘Morphine’ in 2008.

The film was based on the cycle of stories by Mikhail Bulgakov ‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook’ and the story “Morphine”. The script was written by Sergey Bodrov Jr. in 1999.

In the story, which starts in the fall of 1917, a young doctor Mikhail Polyakov is appointed to a post of a zemstvo (country) doctor in a rural hospital. There, the main character unsuccessfully tries to save a patient with diphtheria, he has to deliver a baby, as well as to treat inflammation, and for the first time in his practice, he carries out complex surgeries.

In winter, a peasant girl, who had got into a flax breaker, was taken to the hospital where Polyakov worked. The machine crushed the girl’s legs. An employee at the zemstvo hospital, paramedic Anatoly Lukich doubted the success of the surgery and feared for the patient’s life. However, Dr. Polyakov insisted on amputation of the right leg and successfully performed the surgery.