Review of: Elena Vishlenkova and Andreas Renner, eds., История медицины и медицинской географии в Российской империи [“History of Medicine and Medical Geography in the Russian Empire”] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Inspecting Hospitals in the Russian Empire: Dr. John Harry’s Account, 1805–1806
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 2013
This paper examines the efforts of the Russian government to modernize medical administration and hospital services during the reign of Alex-ander I (1801-1825). Based on the report of the English doctor John Harry, it reviews the state of medical care in Russia and initiatives to improve clinical treatment. Based on these sources, it is argued that hospitals in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, were undergoing a transition from being homes of refuge to institutions for the treatment of the sick. Their conditions were largely dependent on proper governance, as well as funding. Attempts by the Russian authorities to address issues of public health correlated with similar developments in Western Europe at the time.
Polish medicine in the Russian Empire in the first third of the 19th century
Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki, 2019
An offi cial's complaint about a Polish private doctor who treated his children for scarlet fever in 1827 gave rise to a unique document-a description of the treatment process and of the doctor's interaction with patients, pharmacists, and Russian authorities. Such evidence is rarely found in the Russian archives. Since private doctors did not report to the offi cials, their testimonies, as a rule, are not preserved in the state archives. A text found in the archives of the Vilna Medical Board stimulated the authors of the present article to investigate the state of medical care and medical culture of the Polish population that became part of the Russian Empire after the Third Partition of Poland. Vishlenkova and Zatravkin have found that, unlike the rest of the Empire, a rather dense network of private medical care existed in Vilna province until the 1830s, and the level of scientifi c medical culture of the patients allowed them to establish control over treatment.
Medical Geography in Historical Perspective (review)
2002
Research in the geography of health, disease, and disability has always occupied an ambiguous position within the discipline of geography. Historians of science and medicine have traced the genealogy of medical geography back to the Enlightenment, and medical geographic approaches today inform a wide variety of research endeavors in the social and behavioral sciences. Yet until the 1990s, historians of the discipline of geography neglected this subfield.
Chapter 2: The geographical imperative in nineteenth-century French medicine
Medical History, 2000
Medical geography was an abiding but at times peripheral concern of the medical art in nineteenth-century France. This article reviews selected works of the major medical geographers and examines the conditions of their emergence. Only mildly concerned with the values of cartographic precision, the article lays a foundation for future investigations into the subliminal geography of the medical profession as regards issues of race, imperialism, and disciplinary politics.' The perception of links between climate or physical environment and human health, of course, has a long history.2 French medical geographers and expeditionary physicians of the nineteenth century frequently engaged the ideas of Hippocrates and other historical figures in their work.3 Although it contained no maps, the Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places stands as the foundational text of the environmental geography of disease. France, perhaps more than any other country of Europe, has long celebrated the works of Hippocrates, and in 1800 a French-trained physician
The unspoken history of medicine in Russia La storia non raccontata della medicina in Russia
This paper analyzes the cases of neglect and inadvertence in Russian medical history. Closer scrutiny of the vivid examples of the artifacts and names that were not recognized and honored, or were crossed out for some reason, could give us an alternative outlook on the Russian medical heritage and provide more complete picture of the framework. Some possible reasons for such neglect might be the absence of artifacts or technologies for their study (Birch bark manuscripts from Novgorod or human remains from Sungir); preference to the extraordinary units in prejudice of common things (Kunstkamera); semantic blindness to nurses, women and patients in favour of male doctors; and political trends (anti-genetics campaign in the USSR). But at the same time the role of medicine in the State and the society as a whole was underestimated for a long time. It is proved by the representation of doctors in public environment – the rst monument to the doctor, that of Nikolay Pirogov, was unveiled only in the end of 19 th century –. We analyze these issues using the materials of the Russian Museum of Medicine of the NA Semashko National Research Institute of Public Health. Questo saggio analizza i casi di oblio e di trascuratezza nella storia medica russa. Uno sguardo più ravvicinato ad alcuni esempi emblematici di oggetti o personaggi che non sono stati riconosciuti e onorati, o che per qualche ragione furono cancellati, può fornire una visuale alternativa sul patrimonio materiale della medicina russa e dare un quadro più completo della situazione. Alcune possibili ragioni per tali " dimenticanze " possono essere l'assenza di tracce materiali oppure delle tecnologie adatte al loro studio (si pensi alle iscrizioni novgorodiane su corteccia di betulla o ai resti umani di Sungir); preferenza per gli oggetti di natura straordinaria a detrimento di quelli più comuni (Kunstkamera); una sorta di cecità semantica per infermiere, donne in genere e pazienti, a favore del medico maschio; tendenze politiche (ad es., la campagna contro la genetica nell'URSS). Ma, al tempo stesso, il ruolo della medicina nello Stato e nella società nel suo insieme fu sottostimato per lungo tempo. Tutto ciò è dimostrato dalla raffgurazione di medici negli spazi pubblici – il primo monumento a un medico, quello a Nikolay Pirogov, fu inaugurato solo alla ne del 19° secolo –. Analizzeremo questi argomenti utilizzando il materiale prove-niente dal Museo Russo
Health Care in the Black Sea Region in Late Imperial Russia and in World War I
Science almanac of Black sea region countries
There is a prevailing myth that before the revolutions of 1917 and the advent of Soviet power, Imperial Russia did not produce factory-prepared medicines, requiring most or all such medicines to be imported.This article refutes that misconception, documenting from printed and archival sources that some 300 chemical, factories and some 100 pharmaceutical factories operated in Russia in 1913and that some zemstvos used only domestic medicines. The article emphasizes that before the 20 th century the vast majority of medicines were based on botanicals. This was true even after the discovery of sulfa drugs and antibiotics because some botanicallybased medicines were (and are now) superior to synthetics. Such was the case with quinine for malaria, endemic and epidemic throughout Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.The article explains the reasons why Russia imported the new chemically synthesized medicines, the so-called "magic bullets," despite having prerequisites for production such as outstanding chemists and a large petroleum industry.The article emphasizes that the Russian pharmaceutical industry grew more robust during World War I because of synergy from many quarters and because the fetters on the industry were removed. The importance of the Black Sea Region is highlighted in the development of the Russian pharmaceutical industry before and during World War I.
Approaches to medical geography: An historical perspective
Social Science & Medicine, 1985
This paper provides a brief account of the development of various approaches to medical geography through a tree diagram. It is possible to visually present six important aspects of medical geography through this diagram: various approaches to medical geography; the approximate time of their developments; the mother approaches from which they originated; their relationships with other approaches; scale; and extent of studies done in the past.
Thanks to the opening of archives and the forging of exchanges between Russian and Western scholars interested in the history of medicine, it is now possible to write new forms of social and political history in the Soviet medical field. Using the lenses of critical social histories of healthcare and medical science, and looking at both new material from Russian archives and interviews with those who experienced the Soviet health system, the contributors to this volume explore the ways experts and the Soviet state radically reshaped medical provision after the Revolution of 1917. Soviet Medicine presents the work of an international group of leading scholars. Twelve essays—treating subjects that span the 74-year history of the Soviet Union—cover such diverse topics as how epidemiologists handled plague on the Soviet borderlands in the revolutionary era, how venereologists fighting sexually transmitted disease struggled to preserve the patient’s right to secrecy, and how Soviet forensic experts falsified the evidence of the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940. This important volume demonstrates the crucial role played by medical science, practice, and culture in the shaping of a modern Soviet Union and illustrates how the study of Soviet medical history can benefit historians of medicine, science, the Soviet Union, and social and gender historians.