On Land and Sea. Medical geography in the Russian empire (1770—1870)

为什么医学在建立，维持和理解俄罗斯帝国的过程中至关重要，或者说被认为至关重要？它是给帝国臣民带来了健康，还是通过新的卫生制度压制了他们？虽然医学专家起草了纪律制度和利用边缘地区资源的方法，甚至梦想着改善环境的项目，但问题仍然存在，这些计划最终是如何执行的？以往的研究几乎没有研究过这些问题。为了回答这些问题，该项目从当代医学地理学的概念出发，将疾病定义为生物体与环境之间的不平衡。为了对抗或预防疾病，医务人员研究了俄罗斯帝国外围的地理参数和人类。为此目的而产生的医学知识将在多种文献中进行研究：医生的笔记本和病人的病史，指示和报告，地形描述和统计帐目，回忆录和流行文章。通过与周边地区的“传统”医学文化的互动以及与世界各地学者的定期交流，关于环境背景下健康和疾病的新的医学地理学论述得以发展。1770年至1870年是帝国扩张的时期，也是内部巩固的时期。医疗事业显著发展；医生们以专家的身份获得了影响力，他们被派往庞大的俄罗斯帝国及其周边海域的各个地方。在此背景下，该项目结合了宏观和微观分析。它突出了通过学术论述的医学知识的跨国或更确切地说是帝国间的转移。这种方法将俄罗斯与欧洲海外帝国相提并论，并将医学与其他学科（地理、气候学、气象学）联系起来。在地方一级，该项目采用了广泛的后殖民视角，从帝国中心代表的角度看待“传统”医学如何塑造医学科学。利用医学地理学，医生们像其他地方的医生一样，帮助将俄罗斯帝国的空间多样性概念化。然而，俄罗斯的案例比其他帝国历史更清楚地突出了帝国医学的本质，从而扩大了我们对帝国如何运作的理解。在沙皇俄国，医学并没有因为被转移到偏远的边缘地区而成为帝国，而是因为医学专家和专业知识帮助控制并将这些边缘地区定义为“其他”。该项目将由一个由两名教授、两名博士后、两名博士生和四名学生助理组成的“纠缠”研究小组进行。这种合作有助于俄德两国学术文化的交融，有助于更好地了解两国的共同历史。

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 supressed 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, the question remains, how were these plans eventually enforced?Previous research has hardly studied these questions. To answer them the project starts from the contemporary concept of medical geography which defined disease as an imbalance between living bodies and the environment. Medics studied geographical parameters as well as humans on Russia’s imperial periphery in order to fight or prevent diseases. The medical knowledge produced for this purpose will be studied in manifold documents: physicians’ notebooks and patient histories, instructions and reports, topographic descriptions and statistical accounts, memoirs, and popular articles. The new medical-geographical discourse about health and disease in environmental contexts evolved through interaction with “traditional” medical cultures at the peripheries and in regular exchange with scholars worldwide.The years between 1770 and 1870 were a time of imperial expansion, but also of internal consolidation. The medical service grew significantly; physicians gained influence as experts, deployed to all parts of the vast Russian empire and the seas surrounding it. Against this background, the project combines macro- and micro-analyses. It highlights the transnational or rather inter-imperial transfer of medical knowledge through scholarly discourse. This approach considers Russia alongside European overseas empire and links medicine with other disciplines (geography, climatology, meteorology). On the local level, the project adopts a broadly postcolonial perspective on how “traditional” medicine shaped medical science as conducted by representatives of the imperial centre. Utilizing medical geography, physicians helped conceptualize the Russian empire’s spatial diversity as did physicians elsewhere. Yet the Russian case highlights the essence of imperial medicine more clearly than other imperial histories and thus will enlarge our understanding 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”.The project will be conducted by an “entangled” research team consisting of two professors, two postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students and four student assistants. The cooperation contributes to the entanglement of Russian and German academic cultures and to a better understanding of the two countries′ mutual history.