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

为什么医学在俄罗斯帝国的建立、维持和理解中至关重要--或者被认为至关重要？它是给皇室臣民带来了健康，还是通过新的卫生制度来压制他们？虽然医学专家起草了纪律制度和方法，以利用外围国家的资源，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？以前的研究几乎没有研究这些问题。为了回答这些问题，该项目从当代医学地理学的概念开始，该概念将疾病定义为活体和环境之间的不平衡。医务人员研究地理参数以及俄罗斯帝国周边的人类，以抗击或预防疾病。为此目的产生的医学知识将在多种文件中进行研究：医生笔记本和病人病历、说明和报告、地形描述和统计帐户、回忆录和流行文章。在环境背景下关于健康和疾病的新的医学地理学话语是通过与外围的“传统”医学文化的互动以及与世界各地学者的定期交流而发展起来的。1770年至1870年之间的几年是帝国扩张的时期，但也是内部巩固的时期。医疗服务显著增长；医生作为专家获得了影响力，部署到庞大的俄罗斯帝国及其周围海域的所有部分。在此背景下，该项目将宏观分析和微观分析结合起来。它强调了医学知识通过学术话语进行的跨国转移，或者更确切地说是跨帝国转移。这种方法将俄罗斯与欧洲海外帝国并驾齐驱，并将医学与其他学科(地理学、气候学、气象学)联系起来。在地方一级，该项目采用了一个广泛的后殖民视角，由帝国中心的代表开展的“传统”医学如何塑造医学科学。与其他地方的医生一样，医生利用医学地理学帮助对俄罗斯帝国的空间多样性进行了概念化。然而，与其他帝国历史相比，俄罗斯的案例更清楚地突显了帝国医学的本质，从而将扩大我们对帝国如何运作的理解。在沙皇统治的俄罗斯，医学之所以成为帝国，不仅仅是因为它被转移到了一个偏远的边缘，而是因为医学专家和专业知识帮助控制了这个非常边缘的地方，并将其定义为“其他”东西。该项目将由一个由两名教授、两名博士后研究人员、两名博士生和四名学生助理组成的“纠缠”研究团队进行。这一合作有助于俄罗斯和德国学术文化的纠缠，并有助于更好地了解两国的相互历史。

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.