zdoroviena.r52.ru ("Health on r52.ru") was a Nizhny Novgorod popular-science website about medicine and health, known from archival snapshots dated 2002. It ran in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru as one of the projects of R52.RU: the footer of the home page read "Copyright © 2000-2002 R52" with an explanation that R52 was "the regional partner of Яndex"[1]. The project explained its own Nizhny Novgorod roots directly: as the home page stated, "the heads of R52.RU are, by their first profession, doctors"[1].
What the site looked like
The home page was arranged as a reference portal with a left-hand menu of five blocks. The "Encyclopedias" section combined the sections "Specialties and Methods," "Symptoms and Diseases," "Healthy Lifestyle," "Prevention," "Folk Methods," "First Aid," "Mother and Child," and "Sexual Matters." The "Council" block consisted of the items "Specialists' Answers," "By Request," and "Prognosis." The "Interaction" block offered a page for authors, a forum, a guestbook, and mail, while "Miscellaneous" offered the sections "Interesting Facts," "Addresses, Phone Numbers, Links," and "Once in the Hospital"[1].
Besides the menu, the home page featured site search, a newsletter subscription via Subscribe.Ru, and the site's news feed. At the bottom of the page were the editorial contacts — an ICQ number, 136877633, and a separate "Contacts" link; the home page showed no postal address or phone number[1].
The right-hand column was given over to short recurring inserts: "For Your Information" with a term definition (in the surviving snapshot, scoliosis), "A Name in Medicine" with a biographical note (Kary B. Mullis, 1993 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction), and "A Case in the Hospital" with a medical anecdote[1].
What was published
The home page opened with an address to readers explaining the project's idea: as the home page stated, "We are launching a new project dedicated to human health," and the authors noted that similar and more established projects already existed online. In the same place, the editors asked visitors for advice and invited those willing to "join our medical internet team"[1].
The material feed on the home page covered the period from May 17 to June 21, 2002 — about thirty entries on skin, women's, and nervous diseases, first aid, children's health, and sexual life. Nearly all of them were reprints with a source credited: the sites www.farmo.ru, www.aibolit.h1.ru, and the first-aid section on rkb.kcn.ru appeared most often, along with the magazines "Women's Health" and "Men's Health." One item in this sample is marked as original content — a test titled "Alcoholism or Still Just Everyday Drinking?" credited to zdoroviena.r52.ru[1].
A characteristic feature of the feed was deliberately colloquial captions attached to serious medical articles: a note on liver cirrhosis was captioned "There goes the old liver," and a piece on prostate adenoma was captioned "An Elderly Man's Disease." Some entries remained unedited: two in a row are titled "Diabetic Coma," and one of them is captioned "How to Help a Drowning Person"[1].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod zone r52.ru, and it entered our materials through the directory of the nn.ru catalog. At the same time, it left no noticeable trace in local rankings: it does not appear in the surviving snapshots of the counter.nn.ru counter, on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based. It is also absent from the final voting table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004 — the sites that made it into that voting from the r52.ru zone were riann.r52.ru and dom.r52.ru[3]. By the time of that vote, however, the project had long since stopped updating.
How it closed
Updates stopped in the summer of 2002: the snapshot from November 28, 2002 repeats the August one word for word — the same feed with its last entry from June 21, the same address about launching the project, the same note on scoliosis[2]. In other words, by the end of 2002 the site had been standing still for at least five months.
The last home-page snapshot in our web-archive sample is dated November 28, 2002[2]; today the domain zdoroviena.r52.ru does not respond. The project remains one of the early examples of how thematic portals arose in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: made by doctors on their own initiative, assembled mostly from other people's reprints, and abandoned before they could accumulate any content of their own.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, November 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)