OFFICIAL PHYSICIANS WITHIN the MEDICAL LANDSCAPE of the RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1760S)
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OFFICIAL PHYSICIANS WITHIN THE MEDICAL LANDSCAPE OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1760s) by Kateryna Pasichnyk Submitted to Central European University Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Professor Emese Lafferton Second Reader: Professor Jan Hennings Budapest, Hungary CEU eTD Collection 2018 Budapest Statement of Copyright Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Central European Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. CEU eTD Collection Abstract This thesis concerns professional paths of official physicians in the 1760s Russian empire, focusing primarily on the example of a group of students recruited from the Kiev-Mohyla Academy to the hospital schools in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. The recruitments of students created a basis for interaction between the Medical Chancellery, the local administration of the Hetmanate (Left-Bank Ukraine)—the semi-autonomous territory where the Academy was located—and the students who volunteered to study medicine. The research compares the Chancellery’s vision of recruitment as embodied in the legal framework it created and the challenges it faced when it came time to implement these laws. It discusses the social and cultural considerations which pushed students to choose a medical profession. It also traces the graduates’ careers, their involvement into the state service as surgeons, “armchair doctors” and public servants. The thesis finds that the recruitment of students from the Academy to new educational centers and their subsequent engagement in the imperial structures reveal the process of an inadvertent integration of subjects from the Hetmanate into a broader imperial network. This study also demonstrates the increased role of the Medical Chancellery/College in juridification of medical practice. CEU eTD Collection i Table of contents Introduction...............................................................................................................................4 1.1 First Recruitments and Apprenticeship ............................................................................ 11 1.2 Legal Dimension of the Recruitment ................................................................................ 16 1.2.1 New Ideas of Schooling in “The Regulation on Hospitals” (1735) .......................... 17 1.2.2 Inviting Those Who Want to Come: The Synod’s Decree (1754) ............................. 20 1.2.3 Dealing with the Lack of Students: The Synod’s Decrees (1755-1756) ................... 23 Chapter 2. “I Have a Keen Desire to Serve”: Integration Through Education .................... 26 2.1 Multifaceted Integration: Medical Recruitment within the Context of the Hetmanate ....... 26 2.2 Those Who Want to Go: State Demands and Student Responses ...................................... 31 2.2.1 Standardizing Recruitment Campaigns ................................................................... 32 2.2.2 Students Travel to Saint Petersburg and Moscow .................................................... 38 2.2.3 Recruited Students ................................................................................................... 46 2.2.4 Social Affiliations .................................................................................................... 52 Chapter 3. “Servants of Your High Imperial Majesty”: Medics as Public Servants............ 62 3.1 Surgeons and Doctors ..................................................................................................... 62 CEU eTD Collection 3.2 The Text of Petr Pogoretskii ............................................................................................ 67 3.3 The Poem by Martin Terekhovskii.................................................................................... 71 ii Chapter 4. Outlawing “Vagabond Treatment”...................................................................... 77 4.1 The Legal Framework ..................................................................................................... 77 4.2 Procedure and Institutions Involved ................................................................................ 82 4.3 Participants and Their Strategies .................................................................................... 87 4.4 From Examination to Adjudication .................................................................................. 91 4.5 In Front of the Medical College and Behind its Back ....................................................... 96 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 100 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 104 Appendices .................................................................................................................................1 CEU eTD Collection iii Introduction Sociocultural history of medicine in early modern Russia is a developing field of research which provides historians with a new perspective to approach broader questions of early modern Russian state and society. This thesis traces medical career paths of official physicians of the Russian empire but concerns two broader themes of imperial history: the functioning of the legal system in the early modern state and the empire’s interaction with its Western borderlands. I focus on the regulations and implications of two kinds of decrees initiated by the main medical institution, the Medical Chancellery, one regarding the recruitment of students to hospital schools in Saint Petersburg and Moscow from the Hetmanate/Little Russia—a semi-autonomous territory in the Western borderlands of the empire—and another about the condemnation of illegal healing. I show the increased juridification of the medical sphere, starting from the 1750s, which led to the spread of the authority of the Chancellery in the administration of medical matters, but also unintentionally precipitated the integration of imperial subjects from the Hetmanate into imperial structures. The Medical Chancellery (1721) 1 was a governmental institution within the administrative system of the state. It held the authority over the lower medical administration such as city surgeons and hospitals, supervised public healthcare and was responsible for combating epidemics and licensing medical practitioners.2 During the reign of Catherine II, the Chancellery was restructured and the Medical College (1763) was created with two separate offices for business and medical matters, with a doctor and a bureaucrat heading them CEU eTD Collection 1 Here I refer to the Medical Chancellery created according to the project of a new archiater—the ruler’s chief physician and the head of the Medical Chancellery— Johann Blumentrost. The first Medical Chancellery dates back to 1714 - Clare Griffin, “The Production and Consumption of Medical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Russia: The Apothecary Chancery” (PhD diss., University College London, 2012), 7. 2 Andreas Renner, Russische Autokratie und europäische Medizin. Organisierter Wissenstransfer im 18 Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010), 46-47. 4 respectively. 3 The College broadened the Chancellery’s purview: launching systematic information gathering across the empire, writing topographical accounts, dispensing medical advice to the population, and overseeing an expended system of medical offices, as new positions of civil doctors were created after the provincial reform from 1775.4 By focusing on the analysis of decrees regarding medical matters, this thesis will demonstrate another largely unexplored role of the Medical Chancellery/College as an initiator of new decrees and their enforcer. The study will reveal that the Medical Chancellery created texts for the first decrees on the recruitment of students to the hospital schools under the influence of foreign ideas on education which emphasized the importance of the creation of loyal servants through schooling. The issue of foreign impact on Russian medicine is not new.5 The predominance of the foreigners among state medics till the second half of the eighteenth-century 6 and the adherence of Russian official medicine to a Western-style model, explain such considerable attention. Clare Griffin and Andreas Renner in their research on seventeenth and eighteenth centuries medicine, respectively, have shown that there was no direct transplantation of foreign models. Griffin emphasizes that physicians at the Muscovite court selectively implemented and critically assessed Western ideas.7 Renner asserts that European medicine was adopted to new realities and, thus, inevitably underwent changes becoming in many respects different to its original.8 3 John Alexander, Bubonic plague in early modern Russia: public health and urban disaster (Oxford: University Press, 2003), 42-44; The founding decree of the Medial College approved its body of eight voting members. “The medical department: three doctors, one staff-surgeon, one surgeon, one operator, and one apothecary assisted by two secretaries and a translator. The business