Anna Afanasieva

Associate Professor, Department of World History, Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University, Yaroslavl, Russia.

I received my Candidate of Sciences degree from Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University in 2004 for the thesis “British Women Travelers in East Africa in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Status and Representations.” My main research interests are in British and Russian imperial history, travelogues, and the history of medicine (mainly in colonial contexts). I am now working on the history of Russian medicine in the Kazakh steppe in the nineteenth century.

Russian Imperial Medicine: A Conflict of Exceptionalisms?

Beginning with its importation of learned medicine from Western Europe in the late 17th century, Russian medicine formed a part of Western medical tradition, which by the early 19th century had established itself as the only scientific medicine and was actively expanding over the world as the dominant, monopolistic form of medical theory and practice.

However, the texts of Russian doctors working in imperial borderlands in the 19th century demonstrate a rather distinct approach to local, non-Western, medicine, which went against the mainstream trend of imperial medicine and was rooted in a specific perception of the local people and the perspectives of their integration into the empire.

Was it a sign of the exceptionalism of the Russian imperial experience or of a successful break with the exceptionalism of Western medicine? How was it possible for the physicians to incorporate the “barbaric” practices of the “backward” people into the grand system of scientific medical knowledge of the 19th century? These questions are addressed in the paper, which seeks to conceptualize Russian imperial medicine as part of both Western medical knowledge and Russia’s imperial project.