The Production and Consumption of Medical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Russia: The Apothecary Chancery. Clare Louise Griffin Thesis presented for PhD examination at UCL, September 2012 1 I, Clare Louise Griffin, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract. This thesis explores the importance of Western knowledge at the Russian court from the 1620s to the 1700s. After the disorder of the Time of Troubles the Russian court, under pressure from ambitious neighbours, sought to use elements of Western European learning and skill to further reconstruction. Reconstruction developed into an expansion of state powers over Russian life, facilitated by the growing system of courtly departments that were partly staffed by foreign experts. Consequently, this thesis engages with debates concerning how Russians related to Westerners and Western ideas. Here these debates will be reassessed through an examination of the reports and other texts Western experts produced for the court. Foreign influence was especially significant in shaping medicine: the court medical department – the Apothecary Chancery – was staffed with foreign medical practitioners overseen by Russian officials. The Apothecary Chancery medical practitioners produced reports on a range of subjects linked to medicine: medicaments, patient examinations and autopsies. Reports were commonly linked to the wider concerns of the court, such as autopsies on politically or diplomatically important people. The Apothecary Chancery also produced texts aimed at affecting the lives of Muscovites outside the court, such as reports on witchcraft and the sale of medicines, as well as medical recipe books aimed at educating Russians. This dissertation examines the production and consumption of these reports and medical recipe books by the Russian court. It studies the intellectual context and sources that guided the foreign medical practitioners in fashioning their reports. It also scrutinises the purposes for which the Russian court commissioned such texts, and the modifications of the medical practitioners’ views to suit their purposes. This thesis shows Russian interaction with Western ideas to have been selective and critical. 3 Table of Contents. Abstract 3 Table of Contents 4 Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6-17 Chapter One: The Place of the Apothecary Chancery within the Muscovite Administrative System 18-41 Chapter Two: The Role of the Apothecary Chancery Director 42-75 Chapter Three: The Selection of Medical Experts 76-108 Chapter Four: Production of Medical Knowledge in the Apothecary Chancery 109-143 Chapter Five: Medical Books and the Apothecary Chancery 144-180 Chapter Six: The Regulation of Harmful Substances 181-214 Conclusion 215-218 Appendices 219-223 Works Cited 224-235 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the funding bodies that enabled me to complete this thesis. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) provided funding for the first three years, and also for my main research trip to Moscow, as well as an initial archival trip with the Russian Archive Training Scheme. Grants from the AHRC, UCL Graduate School, the Centre for Russian Studies, and BASEES helped me with conference travel costs. Many people have helped me over the past four years. Particular thanks go to my supervisor, Sergei Bogatyrev, for his tireless support and encouragement. Thanks also go to other readers of my thesis, Martyn Rady, Hal Cook, Lauren Kassell, Faith Wigzell and Christopher Nicholson. Their comments and suggestions have been invaluable. All remaining mistakes are my own. During my research year in Russia, I benefited from the help and encouragement of a great many academics and archivists. I am grateful to the archive staffs of RGADA, GIM, RGL-NIOR, BAN and RNL for their help and patience. Thanks also go to my Russian colleagues, who were generous with their time, made valuable suggestions, and pointed me towards resources I would otherwise have overlooked. Particular thanks go to Aleksandra Ippolitova, Tatiana Isachenko, Boris Morozov, Ingrid Schierle, Rem Simonov, and Andrei Toporkov. I was able to present various parts of my thesis work at a number of conferences: Court Medicine Conference, London School of Economics, June 2012; Slavonic and Medieval Studies Group bi-annual meeting, London, March 2011; The Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (formerly AAASS) annual conference, Los Angeles, November 2010; Seminar of S. M. Kashtanov, Moscow, May 2010; Commission for the Study of Natural Philosophical Book Learning in the Culture of Rus’, part of the Council for the Study of the History of World Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, March 2010; German Historical Institut, Moscow, January 2010; The Society for the Social History of Medicine Postgraduate Conference, Dublin, April 2009; The British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, Cambridge, April 2009; The Centre for Russian Studies, UCL- SSEES, March 2009. I am grateful to the organisers of these events for giving me an opportunity to present my work, and to the audiences for making valuable suggestions, and providing encouragement. Thanks also go to my fellow postgraduates, and the SSEES community, both academics and administrators, for making a difficult four years a little easier. I also thank all my friends and family who have supported me. Finally, very special thanks to my Simon, for everything. 5 Introduction During the seventeenth century, foreign medical practitioners working in the court medical department, the Apothecary Chancery, provided medical knowledge to the Russian court on the orders of Muscovite administrators. This knowledge, taken from literate Western European medicine, was produced in the form of written reports addressing specific issues of concern and was consumed by various Russian officials, including the tsar and his counsellors. Later, the department also composed texts aimed at other groups within Russian society, but always according to the aims of the court. Thus Muscovites actively sought Western medical expertise to aid in solving issues then facing the Russian court. This thesis is concerned with the implications of the Apothecary Chancery’s knowledge production for the study of the Muscovite reception of Western knowledge. The use of Western medical expertise in seventeenth-century Russia can ultimately be traced to developments of the 1480s, when the first recorded court doctors arrived in Russia from Western Europe.1 The medical world into which they arrived was markedly different to that which they had left behind. The majority of medical practitioners in Russia were semi-professional native folk healers who never kept records and about whom we know little. Such illiterate healers were also present elsewhere in Europe, but they existed alongside university-educated physicians and guild-trained surgeons and apothecaries, of which there were none in Russia. Medical texts were also in limited supply in Russia before the seventeenth century, mainly taking the shape of short, practical texts interpolated into other works.2 The sixteenth century saw a growth in the number of such works, as well as the first full-length medical texts, focusing on the medical uses of herbs and plants.3 These works were 1 See Franz Dörbeck, ‘Origin of Medicine in Russia’, Medical Life, 30 (1923), 223-34 (p. 227); Inna Liubimenko, ‘Vrachebnoe i lekarstvennoe delo v Moskovskom gosudarstve’, Russkii istoricheskii zhurnal, 3-4 (1917), 1-36 (p. 5). 2 L. F. Zmeev, Russkie vrachebniki. Issledovanie v oblasti nashei drevnei vrachebnoi pis’mennosti, Pamiatniki drevnei pis’mennosti i isskustv CXII [Hereafter Vrachebniki] (St Petersburg, [n.pub.], 1896), p. 2; V. F. Gruzdev, Russkie rukopisnye travniki [Hereafter Travniki] (Leningrad: Voenno-morskoi meditsinskaia akademiia, 1946), pp. 11-17. 3 The earliest full-length herbal translated into Russian was the 1534 translation Blagoprokhladnyi vertograd. See David Miller, ‘The Lübeckers Bartholomaeus Ghotan and Nicolaus Bülow in Novgorod and Moscow and the Problem of Early Western Influences on Russian Culture’, Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9 (1978), 395-412 (p. 404); B. N. Morozov, ‘Travnik iz Postel’noi kazny Ivana Groznogo? Khar’kovskaia rukopis’ 1534g. – novyi pamiatnik knizhnoi masterskoi mitropolita 6 translations of Western works, commonly imported through Poland via Smolensk.4 Even before the establishment of the Apothecary Chancery learned, literate, professionalised medicine was in limited supply in Russia, and that which did exist came from Western Europe. From the late fifteenth century on, Western medical practitioners became increasingly important to the Russian court, resulting in the establishment of a court department to administer them sometime in the 1560s or 1570s.5 This department, like many others, continued to work for at least part of the Time of Troubles, although it may have been closed in some years.6 The early history of the department is murky because existing Apothecary Chancery survive only from the late 1620s, hence the start period of this thesis. The Apothecary Chancery was one of the longest surviving of all the seventeenth-century Russian chanceries, remaining sufficiently important to the Russian court for it to continue to exist for over a century.7 Records for the Apothecary Chancery become patchy for the very late seventeenth century and