Medical Reactions and Debates: Plague Tractates from Russia

Abstract The catastrophe of 1771 called into question the efficacy of Russia’s developing medical profession and public health institutions. Their failure to ward off disaster demanded explanation and justification, all the more so because of the empire’s enhanced exposure to infection through annexation and penetration of plague-enzootic territory in the south. Throughout the epidemic the imperial authorities consulted the medical professionals and mobilized a considerable proportion of them. Together with the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74, the plague reinforced efforts to recruit medical personnel abroad and to expand medical training at home. For the many practitioners who fought the epidemic, moreover, it posed insistent problems of theory and practice. They pondered its origins and identification, the nature of the disease, and the means of prevention and treatment. The peculiarities of the Moscow outbreak aroused doubts about traditional explanations of plague. Analogous doubts might question the value of medical professionals to the state and society. To vindicate the actions of medical practitioners during the epidemic and to forestall criticism of their role in the formulation of public health policy, some doctors and surgeons seized the occasion to publish reasoned explanations of the cataclysm. Their explanations drew lessons from the tragedy in hopes of averting its repetition; they also expressed intensified commitment to an expansive, activist policy toward epidemic disease. Thus the medical debates about the plague continued long after its end, stimulating medical policies and thought, research and publication in Russia. If medical thinkers from Russia made no great discoveries in the scientific study of plague, they brought the subject to a respectable level of discourse and demonstrated a thorough, frequently critical, knowledge of the lengthy European tradition of plague tractates. Their contributions enlivened that tradition for Russian and European audiences.