Medical Geography in Imperial Russia A Transnational Concept at the Service of the Empire, 1770-1870

Afanasyeva, Anna; Renner, Andreas und Vishlenkova, Elena (2021): Medical Geography in Imperial Russia A Transnational Concept at the Service of the Empire, 1770-1870. In: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Bd. 69, Nr. 1: S. 3-29

Abstract

Why was medicine crucial - or considered to be crucial - in the building, sustaining and understanding of the Russian Empire? Did it bring health to the imperial subjects or were they only supressed and manipulated through new regimes of hygiene? While medical experts drafted disciplinary regimes and ways to exploit the peripheries' resources and even dreamt of projects to improve the environment - how were these plans eventually enforced? Research has hardly studied these questions. This article argues that the concept of medical geography provides an answer. Defining disease as an imbalance between living bodies and the environment, this concept flourished roughly between the 1770s and 1870s. 'This was more than a sandwich period between the heydays of medical enlightenment and the rise of bacteriology and laboratory medicine. In this century before professionalization the Russian medical service grew significantly;physicians gained influence as experts, they were deployed to all parts of the vast Russian empire and also the seas surrounding it. Medics studied geographical parameters as well as humans on Russia's imperial periphery in order to fight or prevent diseases. The article analyses the social and cultural role physicians played as an imperial elite as well as their participation in the transnational medical-geographical discourse about health and disease in environmental contexts. The pathologization of hot climates serves as a case study. The article places Russia alongside European overseas empires and links medicine with other disciplines (geography, climatology, meteorology). The Russian case highlights the essence of imperial medicine more clearly than other imperial histories and thus will enlarge our understanding of how empires work. In Tsarist Russia medicine did not become imperial just because it was transferred to a remote periphery, but because medical experts and expertise helped control and define this very periphery as something other.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften > Historisches Seminar
• Themengebiete: 900 Geschichte und Geografie > 900 Geschichte
• ISSN: 0021-4019
• Sprache: Englisch