CHAPTER 6Analyzing Catarrh, Overcoming Climate

Russia's Catarrh?

In 1782, the pandemic disease that overran Europe became known as the Russian catarrh. A catarrh was a cold disease, so its emergence from the coldest country seemed plausible. Ultimately, however, this incident revealed how the expectation of Europe's physicians increasingly differed from those practicing in Russia. Recording the outbreak served as a case study for ongoing debates about disease transmission. Labeling it a “Russian” catarrh served a second interest: What did the empire signify in Europe in the 1780s? Was Russia an unhealthy space that produced dangerous illnesses, or were Russia's subjects the first victims of an unavoidable pandemic?

Understanding catarrh was not a new problem in 1782. Catarrh pandemics were frequent in the eighteenth century, with the most recent emerging in 1775. Eighteen-century catarrh was not the same disease as the twentieth-first-century catarrh, though both involved the lungs. Dr. William Cullen, a professor at University of Edinburgh, wrote an updated nosological guide to diseases in Latin in 1769, which remained popular enough to be translated into English by the end of the century. According to Cullen, catarrhs belonged to the order Profluvia, a large category of diseases featuring fevers with “increased excretions not naturally bloody.” Catarrhs were “often contagious; [with] encreased excretion of mucus, from the glands of the membrane of the nose, fauces, or bronchia, at least an effort at such excretion.” The category “Catarrhus” included not only a variety of catarrhs but also coryza, rheumatism, and tussis. Cullen further divided catarrhs into two categories, “Catarrh from cold” and “Catarrh from contagion.” The contagious category was marked as “epidemic” (either “Catarrhus epidemicus” or “Rheuma epidemicum”), whereas the cold versions were simply “Catarrrhus benignus” or “Coryza catarrhalis,” among others.¹ A physician trained in Edinburgh before the 1775 or 1782 outbreak would have understood that a common catarrh was what we would call a cold, but epidemic catarrh was a contagious disease marked by a fever.² Italian physicians, by comparison, called epidemic catarrh an influenza, but most British physicians did not use that name until after 1782.³

When the 1782 catarrh arrived in Europe, physicians logically considered their experiences with the 1775 outbreak. In its wake, several physicians published their analysis of the disease, including a fellow of the Royal Society of London, Dr. John Mudge, in his Radical and Expeditious Cure for a Recent Catarrhous Cough (1779). He employed a nosological approach to the disease, placing epidemic catarrh among other conditions involving the lungs. He considered any disease of the lungs as a type of cold, which spanned a range from a cough to a fever, or even spitting blood; modern physicians might identify these as colds, influenza, and tuberculosis. Putrefaction was the primary cause of Mudge's broad category of colds. He explained that “the disorder we commonly call a Cold is generally supposed to be produced from a sudden check of perspiration, by the action of cold upon the surface of the body or the lungs.” This could produce multiple symptoms, because “any sudden suppression or interruption of any excretion which is necessary to a sound state of the constitution, must be productive of mischief.” If putrefaction of the humors was the precipitate cause, then Mudge was certain the climate was the underlying culprit, particularly in Britain. He suggested: “The sudden, and sometimes severe, changes of weather to which this climate is subject, are perhaps the most unhappy circumstances attending our situation; and the pernicious effects of them upon the human constitution are so frequently experienced, that diseases of the breast may be truly considered as endemical among the inhabitants of this island.”⁴

Before the 1782 Russian catarrh, physicians had not agreed on the cause of a catarrh, nor was the term particularly stable as it could be applied to what modern physicians recognize as a wide range of diseases. Mudge believed catarrhs resulted from a cold climate causing putrefaction, but Cullen argued epidemic catarrh (influenza) was contagious, moving from person to person. The opportunity created by 1782 was to gather further evidence to reach an agreement on the primary cause.

One of the earliest mentions of the disease that became the 1782 pandemic was made by Samuel Bentham, during his inspection of Siberia's mines. As many travelers to Siberia would do, he traveled once the rivers were frozen to benefit from the ease of moving along icy rivers. He departed from St. Petersburg and arrived in Perm in October 1781. In a letter sent from Perm to his brother Jeremy in London, he mentioned he kept “as exact a journal as possible, of what passes.” He intended to stay in Perm for “a week, or perhaps a fortnight longer.” Although most of the letter described his investigation of local minerals and his aspirations for Siberian discoveries, completing this letter from Perm was delayed by “a cold in my head.”⁵ In his journal, he noted that he fell ill of “influenza” a week after this first letter on November 5 and suffered from symptoms for the following two days, before departing Perm on November 8.⁶ He neither mentioned in any subsequent letter to Jeremy suffering from either influenza or a catarrh, nor did he note in his journal his cold of the last week of October. A later account would suggest the catarrh pandemic began in Siberia in the fall of 1781 and arrived in St. Petersburg the final week of December before spreading across Europe during the spring of 1782. The timing of Samuel Bentham's illness(es) would fit within this time frame, possibly making his influenza note the first written account of the future pandemic.

When the disease arrived in St. Petersburg, it was recognized as either an epidemic catarrh or influenza, depending on the author. James Harris, the first Earl of Malmesbury, was Britain's envoy extraordinary in Russia from 1777 to 1783. His regular dispatches to the British secretary of state for the Northern Department provide a detailed account of the outbreak. During the last week of December 1781, Harris mentioned that “The Cold still continues at 25 degrees & it is by far the severest winter I recollect to have felt.”⁷ Two weeks later, Harris observed “mild and damp Air which has prevailed here for these last eight or ten days has produced an almost universal Illness, similar to that which some years ago was called in London the Influenza, & in Paris la Grippe. I am the only one of the Corps diplomatique who has escaped it; It has affected Her Imperial Majesty in a slight degree, but I have the satisfaction to learn that She is to day intirely free from it.” To Harris, the extreme cold of December followed by the unseasonable warmth of January resulted in this widespread outbreak. He was confident a return to cold weather would resolve the situation: “A few degrees of Frost which now seems probable, will soon restore health to every body.” However, “I am satisfied that the Illness of the Empress and Prince Potemkin is not solely caused by the epidemical Air. Ill Humour and Dissatisfaction pervade the whole Palace and in these Moments all Business, however essential, is absolutely neglected.”⁸

A week later, the situation had begun to improve. As Harris noted: “The universal Cold and Cough which has prevailed for these last ten days, now begin to diminish.” As more news reached St. Petersburg, Harris now knew “it had been as General at Moscow as here.” Harris was never concerned about the illness nor its effect on the public, but rather how it “occasioned an entire Suspension of Business and is the Cause why my letters have, these last two or three posts, been so uncommonly short and void of Matter.”⁹ As the cold weather continued in February, symptoms continued to abate. Harris wrote: “The weather has been again uncommonly severe; the Thermometer the night before last was at 30 degrees below the freezing point, and has never been less than 20 [degrees] since Monday. The Epidemical distemper diminishes; its Effects have been felt in every part of this neighbourhood, and I understand it has reached Courland and Polish Prussia.”¹⁰ Although Harris was not a physician, his letters provided an accurate account of the timing of the disease's arrival, its movement beyond Russia, and the common belief of the connection between the climate and the illness.

During the late winter and early spring of 1782, the illness traversed the Baltic region, arriving in Britain in May, and then returning to the Continent in the summer. Multiple physicians kept detailed notes on the pandemic. By the end of 1782, numerous publications on the pandemic began to circulate throughout Europe to contribute to the debate. Dr. Johann Daniel Metzger, a professor of medicine at University of Königsburg, published a lengthy tract detailing the arrival of the disease, its symptoms, and potential treatments, compiling the knowledge gained through his correspondence with at least eight other physicians in northern Germany and at least one merchant in St. Petersburg. On the origins of the disease, Metzger detailed that it was popularly known as “the Russian, or the Northern disease.” It was accepted that the disease arrived on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea from St. Petersburg and then moved through German lands. On its arrival, Metzger noted most people believed it to be a “miasmatic epidemic” (epidemischen Miasma), because of the swift progress of the infection. This idea, that particulates in the air were responsible for disease transmission, was a third theory of the cause of disease. Metzger did not believe the disease was contagious nor linked to the weather. Metzger's Russian informant, one “Herr Kant,” wrote that the disease had arrived in St. Petersburg from Tobol’sk in Siberia. Metzger mentioned, however, that one of the other Germans living in St. Petersburg had been informed that the disease did not originate in Tobol’sk, but rather among the Tatars in Astrakhan, which raised the possibility of Middle Eastern origins like the plague a decade earlier.¹¹

By contrast, in a summary report produced by the medical faculty of the University of Paris in 1782, the weather was the primary cause of the pandemic. As the report noted, an “intermittent fever” was circulating during warm weather, but it “yielded easily to ordinary treatment.” However, once the temperature “changed from hot to cold, the illness soon took on another character; the intermittent fever became continuous.” This illness had several accompanying symptoms, but medical faculty agreed it was most appropriately considered a “catarrhal infection” or “the grippe,” as it resembled the earlier outbreak in 1776.¹²

Metzger believed the catarrh pandemic was miasmatic in origin; the University of Paris believed the weather was to blame. Some physicians in Britain, Cullen among them, had already concluded that catarrhs were contagious, moving from person to person, not through the air as others argued. By 1784, when the Society for the Promotion of Medical Knowledge in London compiled its data on the outbreak from across Britain, it agreed that the catarrh must be contagious. The society's report was written by Dr. Edward Whitaker Gray. Before joining the society, Gray had become the keeper of the natural history collection for the British Museum in 1778, and he had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1779. He published in both Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society and two catalogs of the collections at the British Museum. All these roles positioned Gray in the middle of knowledge networks spanning Europe in the late eighteenth century. As a result, his article on the pandemic for the Society for the Promotion of Medical Knowledge circulated in Europe, including a German translation in 1785, as part of Medicinische Beyträge (Gottingen).¹³

Gray produced a detailed assessment of the pandemic outbreak, drawing on multiple British correspondents who were cited throughout as well as references to Metzger's and the University of Paris's publications. Gray was straightforward in his conclusion that the disease was an epidemic catarrh, as defined in Cullen's nosological study. According to Gray, “Very little authentic information has been procured, respecting the history of the disorder, before the time of its appearance in London; all that can upon good authority be related, is, that it prevailed at Moscow, in the months of December 1781, and January 1782, and at St. Petersburgh, in February 1782: it was traced from Tobolski, to which place it was supposed to have been brought from China.”¹⁴ It appears that Metzger was Gray's source for the early outbreak, as Metzger was the only European account to mention Tobol’sk as a site of infection. Metzger was clear, however, that Astrakhan and its Tatars were the likely source of the illness in Russia, not China. Russian authorities had long believed Astrakhan was a vulnerable spot for new diseases to arrive from the Middle East and South Asia, adopting a quarantine system for the city as early as the 1730s.¹⁵ It is possible that Gray simply failed to understand the significance of Astrakhan as a potential origin site, or he was predisposed to assume a Chinese origin for the new illness.

Once the disease left St. Petersburg, according to Gray, its path followed that of the one established in the earlier accounts. The catarrh arrived in “Denmark the latter end of April, or the beginning of May; and many people were said to have died to it at Copenhagen, before the 11th of May. It is not easy to determine with precision, the time of its first appearance in London; that it was here the second week in May, seems very certain.” It then traveled back across the Continent and into the Mediterranean region from France in June to Italy in July and to Portugal and Spain in August and September. Gray reported a similar illness had been observed in “different parts of the East Indies” in “the months of October and November 1781,” but it was not clear if it was the same illness.¹⁶

The list of symptoms was exhaustive, including typical influenza markers such as fevers and chills, coughing, inflammation, and pains. Some symptoms were more atypical, including “bleeding from the nose; spitting of blood; loss of smell or taste; nausea; flatulence.” In general, Gray rarely passed judgment on the long list, finally concluding the “others were remarked as evident signs of a tendency to putrefaction; and in one case, the disease seems to have put on the form of a nervous disorder.” As Gray admitted, “Various, and even contradictory, as the forementioned symptoms appear, their right to be considered as belonging to the influenza, or at least as having been caused by it, will, perhaps, be admitted, when it is observed, that this disorder (as has been remarked of former epidemics) excited, and become complicated with, those complaints to which the persons affected were, from local situation, or constitution, most predisposed.”¹⁷

Following Gray's reviews of the broad range of symptoms with a detailed account of all the various treatments attempted, the outstanding issue to be resolved was to identify the disease and explain its spread. Gray summarized the debate: “Some physicians thought it arose solely from the state of the weather; in other words, that it was a common catarrh, occasioned, as that complaint frequently is, by changes in the sensible qualities of the atmosphere, such as the increase of cold, or moisture; … Others, admitted its cause to be a particular and specific contagion, totally different from, and independent, of the sensible qualities of the atmosphere, yet thought that cause was conveyed by, and resided in the air.” Gray's correspondents, however, reached a different assessment: “that the influenza was contagious, in the common acceptation of that word, that it is to say, that it was conveyed and propagated by the contact, or at least by the sufficiently near approach, of an infected person.” Gray's assessment systematically rejected any connection of this catarrh to the weather, which was the neo-Hippocratic theory. Gray offered a simple rebuttal to this theory: “Another remarkable fact remains to be taken notice of; which, though it is not mentioned as an argument of very great weight, certainly merits some consideration. The influenza prevailed in Russia in the months of December, January, and February, and in Italy and Spain in the months of July, August, and September, consequently its cause must have been capable of resisting almost the two extremes of European heat and cold; a degree of permanence difficult to be conceived, if we suppose that cause to have resided in the air.”¹⁸ In other words, the absence of evidence to support the climatic or miasmatic positions, coupled with the ability to trace the geography of a transmission vector from Russia to Britain and then back to the Continent, left Gray, and the Society for the Promotion of Medical Knowledge, with one conclusion: This disease was contagious.

At the same time, Russia's physicians notably had been missing from the published accounts on Russia's catarrh. Although European physicians debated its origins, they seemingly had little interest in what those living in Russia experienced, beyond Metzger's correspondence with a German merchant in St. Petersburg. In 1791, a decade after the outbreak, the first account of a physician who had worked in Russia was published. This account was written by Charles de Mertens, who once again relied on his Russian career from 1767 to 1773 to provide his insight. Unlike his short text in Philosophical Transactions on scurvy, this 1791 publication was a two-volume analysis about diseases in general, drawing on his career in the Russian Empire for evidence. It was written in Latin and published in Pavia, while he was teaching in Vienna.¹⁹ Because he published his account a decade after leaving Russia, the connection to his time in Moscow may not have been immediately obvious to some readers. Even with those caveats, it remains the only narrative published in the eighteenth century by a physician who had practiced in Russia.

Mertens's chapter on “The Catarrhal Fever” of 1782 was subtitled “The Russian Disease [morbus Russicus], the Grippe, called Influenza.” Like most accounts of the disease, he began with a description of the unusual weather that preceded the outbreak: A “scorching summer in 1781, when the heat and rain continued for three months” was followed by “a very hot and dry season” the following autumn. From correspondents in Russia, he received news from St. Petersburg in January 1782 that the temperature jumped “30 degrees in the space of a day. On the same day they reported that about 40,000 men had been seized with a catarrhal fever, and that scarcely a sufficient number of healthy men had been found for the vigil among the numerous troops; that the said fever had promiscuously attacked the nobles’ servants, and the servants in the court, but few succumbed to the disease, which only lasted for a few days, leaving many of them weak and infirm.” Following the arrival of disease in St. Petersburg, it traveled to “Sweden, Denmark, and the circle of Lower and Upper Saxony were visited by a fever epidemic, which many, because of its place of origin, called the Russian disease, but the English called influenza.”²⁰ Several points differed in the origin of the illness in Mertens's view. It began in St. Petersburg, not Siberia or China, and the precipitating cause was clearly the weather, which was the neo-Hippocratic position.

Mertens did not offer a time frame or explanation how the disease moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow. He did provide, however, a list of symptoms recorded in patients who were treated in the city. Patients “feel tired and horrified, and are soon seized with a cold, with cough, coryza, pain in the head and chest, somewhat difficult breathing, and stiffness. These symptoms became worse on the second day with the subsequent fever…. They feel rheumatic pains in the neck, shoulders, and chest; but they have a constant pain under the upper part of the sternum, in the lungs, throat, and increased coughing. In conclusion, “The symptoms observed in most people in our country indicated that this epidemic disease was a true rheumatic or catarrhal fever, more or less, but, in general, only slightly inflammatory; the fever of this slight inflammation was chiefly found in the internal and external parts of the chest.”²¹ Although Mertens's argument on the origin of the disease differed from most writing in Europe at the time, his list of symptoms neatly matches the other accounts circulating across the Continent. It may be that his advocacy for the climatic origins a decade after a consensus emerged that it was in fact contagious, allowed his observations to be dismissed as irrelevant, or, at least, uninformed.

The documentation produced in the wake of the catarrh pandemic of 1781–1782 reflected firsthand observations. There was broad consensus on the symptoms of the disease and acceptance that it was an epidemic catarrh, as that disease was understood by the nosologists. At the same time, some issues were unresolved. The origin of the disease remained debated, as some in Britain argued for at least Siberian, if not Chinese origins, some physicians in Germany like Metzger pointed to Astrakhan and the Middle East, whereas Mertens believed it began in St. Petersburg. The evidence of men such as Samuel Bentham who diagnosed himself with influenza a month before the disease arrived in St. Petersburg would challenge those who believed in its origin in Petersburg, but that evidence lived in his personal notebook, not in the published accounts. The method of transmission remained debated, as advocates for climatic, miasmatic, and contagionist views all weighed in. The British establishment primarily backed contagionism, but those practicing on the Continent were less persuaded. Knowing that medical evidence failed to persuade the public that the pandemic was not a Russian catarrh, it is plausible that contagionism was not as popular with the broad public as it was with Britain's physicians.

The catarrh pandemic reveals the difficulty of achieving consensus in the medical community at the end of the eighteenth century. With the prominent roles for Edinburgh-trained physicians in Russia, it may not be a surprise that the British medical community advocated for a Chinese origin for the recent pandemic. After all, that shifted responsibility for the European pandemic from Russia and its Anglo-Russian trade network. In fact, it was only the physician who left his position in Russia who remained committed to a Russian origin. This debate, however, uncovered a serious issue. Whereas Russian expertise on scurvy was once sought as particularly valuable, no one in Europe thought physicians in Russia might have knowledge of the so-called Russian catarrh. Part of the reason for this shifting view was the evolution of disease theory in the eighteenth century. For those who still believed that climate was a primary factor in health, Russia offered a unique opportunity to observe the consequences of cold temperatures on bodies. For those who believed that disease was contagious or miasmatic, Russia was no longer exceptional. The causes of disease were far more immediate than the climate or geography.

Those diplomats who were involved in recording the events were not particularly helpful. James Harris, whose letters to the British government detailed the outbreak in the winter of 1781 and 1782, easily dismissed its consequences by the summer once it departed Britain for the Continent. In fact, Harris's primary concern shifted to his health and the persistence of Russia's unhealthy climate. In September 1782, he wrote to the foreign secretary, “My distemper is an annual or rather continual tribute I pay to this climat from the Autumnal to the Vernal Equinox – it never begun so violently as now and I cannot yet see where it will end.” Harris argued that only one outcome was possible: “[If] I stay here much longer that it will so far break my Constitution as to make the Remainder of my life of a Period of Infirmity. I have every year felt more & more the bad effect of this Air, & the Strictist Attention to every thing which contributes to Health has not been able to preserve me from its baneful Influence.”²² His complaints resembled so many of his predecessors in St. Petersburg, and his goal, like theirs, was to be recalled to Britain. In the face of an actual dangerous pandemic, Harris was steadfast; in the face of the regular fall weather, he simply crumbled. Russia's climate continued to break the spirit of its residents, who could now turn to former employees like Mertens for further proof of the dangers.

Resolving Climate

Disease theory moved away from emphasizing the role of climate; remarkably, however, the label of the Russian catarrh remained into the twentieth century, even as epidemic catarrh became known as influenza.²³ The popular, not medical, idea that Russia was a country where diseases emerged persisted. It is not a surprise, therefore, that those men still in Russia's employment actively defended Russia's healthy qualities. Physicians such as Matthew Guthrie continued to publish studies praising Russians’ ability to manage their environment, and his fellow state employees offered new evidence about the empire's ability to manage its disease burden. Perhaps more helpfully, by the end of the eighteenth century, physicians were increasingly cynical about the connection of climate to health, which steadily eroded the long-held opinion of the Russian Empire as an unhealthy space.

In 1785, Guthrie published a pamphlet in St. Petersburg in French, Nouvelles experiences pour servir à determiner le vrai point de congelation du mercure, providing updated information on the academy's ongoing investigation of the freezing point of mercury.²⁴ Having conducted a series of experiments, Guthrie's conclusion was that Peter Simon Pallas's work in Siberia had been confirmed by his own work in St. Petersburg. Guthrie's conclusions were summarized in Medical Commentaries in Edinburgh the following year, which also added the contents of one of Guthrie's recent letters on the treatment of a young boy in St. Petersburg suffering from rabies. Guthrie first examined the patient, insisting on treatment with a “strong mercurial ointment” that was used on the bite wound for fourteen days. Then, against Guthrie's orders, the boy was treated with “Ormskirk medicine” as the “remedy looked specific in his native county, Derbyshire,” which was used for five weeks, until he could once again no longer walk and suffered from fevers. Guthrie then stopped treatment with the Ormskirk remedy, and returned to the mercurial ointment, which led to a full recovery. Guthrie's conclusion was that the English remedy failed to work in Russia, whereas the extreme heat of the mercury treatment could succeed.²⁵

Following his experiments with mercury, Guthrie returned to the primary challenge of Russia: scurvy. In a letter to Medical Commentaries, Guthrie noted that many physicians had discussed “the influence of hot climates on the human body, and its diseases; but few seem to have investigated the effects of cold,” excepting, of course, his own work on the subject, and arguably neglecting Johann Amman, John Cook, and all of the academy's specialists. Following his earlier letter to Philosophical Transactions, Guthrie observed an “extraordinary” scurvy outbreak in St. Petersburg in 1785. “A crop of cabbage, cucumbers, carrots, turnips, &c. having failed that year” left the navy incapable of providing the necessary provisions for its sailors, resulting in record numbers of patients in Kronstadt. The naval hospital had attempted to treat its patients with a locally sourced supply of “berries deservedly reckoned highly antiscorbutic,” but it was discovered that while the berries might prevent scurvy, they did little to ease the symptoms of an active case. Guthrie recommended that the best course of action was “to thin the crowded scorbutic wards, where the foul air evidently retarded their cure” as berries alone had not been sufficient. Furthermore, they adjusted the heat in the wards to the “sweating point” along with a “a deluge of diluting fluids to bring moisture on the skin” as a method to solve the putrefaction that was the source of the scurvy.²⁶

Guthrie's work remained pivotal for the Russian government to shed the negative image spread by its critics in terms of the long-term damage done by its unchecked diseases. For example, Jean-Baptiste Barthélemy de Lesseps was appointed as the vice consul in St. Petersburg for France in 1783. Two years later, he was assigned to the Pacific Expedition of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, to serve as a Russian translator in the North Pacific. In 1787, the expedition left Lesseps in Kamchatka to return to Paris with copies of the expedition's findings from the Pacific. It would take more than a year for Lesseps to cross Eurasia to depart for France from St. Petersburg, but his journey informed his travel narrative about life in Kamchatka and Siberia. Similar to Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, he was not complimentary about Russia's management of its imperial peoples. He suggested that the Russians had introduced smallpox in Kamchatka only in 1767 or 1768, and it had already eliminated three-fourths of the population on the peninsula. In addition, he noted: “There is reason to suspect that the Kamtschadales are indebted to them [the Russians] in like manner for their knowledge of the venereal disease … This pestilence appears to be exotic, and its cure is as difficult as it is rare. They have recourse to various roots and to corrosive sublimate, which is attended in this country with its usual ruinous effects, and the more so, as being indiscreetly administered.”²⁷ Although he believed venereal disease was rare in Kamchatka, it was further proof of the damage the Russians had caused across the empire. His argument had already been contradicted by Johann Gottlieb Georgi, but condemning Russia potentially outweighed accuracy.

In light of the ongoing criticism, Russia's naturalists still needed evidence of their mastery of the climate. Guthrie drew on the data recorded by the academy's long-term project to detail the climate for his final assessment, “A Dissertation on the Climate of Russia” (1790). He relied on the academy's previous fifteen years of weather and temperature records. Guthrie adopted the standard practice of the academy of dividing “the year into two seasons only, as in fact we have but two, properly speaking, viz. winter and summer, the one season running into the other, without leaving well defined intermediate periods.” From the evidence and his personal experiences, Guthrie concluded that “winter certainly must take the lead, … both from its duration and consequences in this northern situation. The duration of winter is generally from the end of September to the beginning of May.” Although winter may have dominated the year, “the air, though cold, is remarkably pure and elastic during our severe frost, so as to give a most surprising degree of spring and tone to the human frame.”²⁸

Guthrie's observations and the academy's climate data produced a positive assessment of the climate. “The severity of the frost” did not lead to suffering from the winter, “but the fact is just the reverse: for people in easy circumstances, who are not obliged to remain much out of doors, but drive, or even walk from one house to another, suffer less than in most countries.” Following his earlier discussion of the weather, Guthrie reiterated that “the warm fur dress [keeps] the body so comfortable, that I am convinced less cold is felt (differences of dress considered) in driving through the streets of Petersburgh in our cold dry air, than through those of London or Edinburgh, during the cold moist weather that obtains there during a great part of the winter; especially as this state of the atmosphere in Britain is often accompanied by bleak winds, whilst the air in Russia, during our greatest cold, is generally serene and calm.” Only those among Russia's elite and foreigners who refused to adopt the correct habits suffered from cold, “because neither the houses nor dress are calculated to keep it [cold] from constantly acting on the body.”²⁹

According to the academy's data, the coldest month was January, when the temperature averaged 24°F below 0°F, but the “mean cold for the six winter months, is, in the afternoon, equal to 27° Fahr. above 0.” The coldest temperature recorded in the previous fifteen years was −62° Fahr, which could be “often felt.” Although “the whole surface of the northern countries is covered with snow to a considerable depth, over which we drive in sledges, without distinguishing between land and water,” the average precipitation in the six months of winter was only five inches. By comparison, the six months of summer averaged eleven inches of rain.³⁰ Guthrie reported the data from the Academy of Sciences for 1774 to 1789, but the sixteen inches of rain per year average he noted was well below the modern average rainfall of nearly twenty-five inches.³¹ If the academy's data were reliable, then one reason for the cold dry air of St. Petersburg may not have been from the peculiarity of Russia's climate, but rather from a particularly dry era of its history. Therefore, Guthrie's conclusions about the connection between climate and health may be faulty not from the data but instead from the atypical nature of Russia's climate in the 1770s and 1780s.

The year after Guthrie published his final word on Russia's climate, Mertens's volumes on disease were published. The first part continued his analysis of various epidemics, including the 1782 catarrh as discussed earlier, but Mertens's experiences in Russia were included throughout the text. The other diseases included were exactly the ones a physician in Russia would discuss—scurvy, smallpox, and syphilis. The chapter on scurvy was a reprint of the article he published in 1778 in Philosophical Transactions, in which he argued that the Russian peasant diet with its reliance on fresh vegetables, particularly “onions, leeks, turnips, and peas” was far more important for their ability to avoid scurvy than the bania. Scurvy was common in Russian cities because the elite avoided this diet in favor of preserved foods with too much salt.³² The three chapters on smallpox inoculation reiterated the benefits of the Suttonian Method as it was used in Russia, and discussed his subsequent practice in Vienna.

The chapter on syphilis, however, offered new information drawn from his Russian career. Syphilis was an “evil disease which shortens men's lives…. It afflicts men with various tortures and after a miserable life usually leads them to the grave at a slow pace; it suffocates them at the very source of future offspring.” Mertens found the persistence of syphilis the most troubling, as there was no reason it “should still exist among the peoples of Europe, when we have a specific remedy against it.” The remedy was a compound of mercury. He wrote: “While I lived in Moscow from 1767 to 1773, I did not hear of the people or inhabitants using it as a remedy; but foreign physicians did use it.” Mertens believed this was a problem only for urban residents and the elite, as he had investigated how Siberians resolved the disease. According to the College of Medicine in St. Petersburg, some Siberians had developed their own cure, taking a “sublimate of mercury” followed by the bania, where they would spend one hour per day until the “symptoms disappeared.”³³ Unlike so much of what had been written about Russia, Mertens believed that syphilis remained a problem in Russia's cities, but it had been resolved with a local solution in Siberia, despite the frequent comment of its occurrence.

In his discussion of the catarrh pandemic, Mertens was clear that Russia's extremely cold climate caused the disease. In his discussion of the endemic diseases, scurvy and syphilis, the climate may have posed a challenge for treatment, but Russian peasants and Siberians developed solutions to each. In both cases, he identified urban elites as the ones incapable of addressing these illnesses, even when remedies were available. He was not writing in response to Guthrie's dissertation, but Mertens's conclusion that the population had long since adapted to its climate was consistent with his former colleague's view.

Guthrie's and Mertens's assessments reflected a turn away from belief that the climate was a primary cause of ill health by the 1790s. They were not alone. William Tooke was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the English translator for Georgi's description of the empire. Although he was not a physician, his work at the academy influenced his comprehensive depiction of the empire in 1799. It borrowed Georgi's categorization of the population of the empire, but Tooke was far more critical about the impact of the climate on physical bodies.³⁴

Tooke acknowledged that some had argued that the cold “be the occasion of certain epidemical diseases,” but he was not convinced it was the only cause. As he explained, “delicate persons, especially of the higher classes, colds, defluxions, rheums, and coughs, are common enough, not merely during the cold of winter, but also at other seasons of the year: the common people know but little of these complaints. These never feel any injury from currents of air, which we call draughts; although persons of the former description frequently take cold even when they have not stirred out of their warm apartments.” Tooke further explained that even “sharp biting frosts” could be managed, “if people are but properly clad, and forbear to sit down, especially upon the banks of snow, which may often cost them their lives.”³⁵ Although Tooke was dismissive of the probability that the temperature had an effect on the body, he retained a fully articulated belief in the effects of the humors on the body.

In his second volume, Tooke began his description of the peoples of the empire by mentioning that “the bodily state of the people is dependent on a thousand things; nature of the soil, climate, weather; way of life, dress, food; manners and usages, even political constitution and religion have a decisive influence on the strength, the durability, the health, in short, the whole physical character of mankind.” Any educated person of the eighteenth century would recognize Tooke's list of influences as Galen's nonnaturals. To accept the influence of the nonnaturals was to accept the importance of “airs” on a body's health. Tooke explicitly stated, however, that a “great number of persons in all these parts attain to a very advanced old age,” which was “one sure proof that in general the climate is not prejudicial to health.”³⁶

Tooke may not have been a physician, but his interest in including a discussion about climate and health reflects how important this idea had been over the previous century. As part of the medical establishment in Russia, Guthrie offered his dissertation as the final evaluation on the issue. His evidence proved that Russia was objectively cold, but he also concluded that this was not a challenge for the empire's population. Others outside of Russia, like Lesseps, might continue to comment on how the Russian government failed to redress the damage done by scurvy, smallpox, and syphilis, but Russia's physicians were far more confident that these diseases were sufficiently controlled, at least among the peasantry.

Pacific Expeditions

As was often the issue, the Russian Empire was not only confronted by disease outbreaks and foreign critics of its policies but also by geopolitical concerns. Britain was frequently the source of those challenges. The two empires might have been dependent on their economic relationship, but Britain's explorations of the North Pacific, led by Captain James Cook, threatened Russia's expansion into the region (figure 6.1). Each of Cook's voyages was reported in Russia, including his death during his third voyage in 1779. Britain's foreign secretary informed the envoy extraordinary, James Harris, of Cook's death in January 1780. In Britain, it was a matter of “universal concern” and a “publick Misfortune.”³⁷ It is not clear if Russia's court would have shared the concern, but the outcome of the Cook's third voyage was to send copies of Cook's new navigation charts and maps for “the North East Coasts of the Empress of Russia's Dominions & the North West Coasts of America” to Russia as a gift for the court.³⁸ By April, Britain's new charts of the North Pacific, demonstrating that Russia's “dominions” in the Pacific existed only in Asia, and not in North America, were dispatched.³⁹ Russia's claims were intentionally being threatened.

Figure 6.1. Captain Cook's third voyage not only mapped the North Pacific but also completed ethnographic studies in Eurasia, including this observation of the Chukchi on the Kamchatkan Peninsula. “Two Chukchi of the Chukotskiy Peninsula, Russia, in front of summer huts (yarangas),” in Ninety Drawings, Some in Indian Ink, Some Coloured, executed by J. Webber during the Third Voyage of Captain Cook (1776–1780). From the British Library Archive.

The solution to this implied threat was for the Russian government to launch another major expedition. Its primary task was not to further describe the land and peoples of the North Pacific, although it would include naturalists, but rather to address the political concern of mapping the coastline as proof of Russia's possessions. In its response to Britain's challenge, the Russian government turned toward a British naval officer, Captain Joseph Billings, who had been the astronomer on the first Cook expedition. After that voyage, Billings had sought employment as a captain with the East India Company (EIC), offering them a proposal to expand their trade in the North Pacific. His plan was blocked by the Hudson's Bay Company, leading the EIC to deny Billings's request. Billings then took his proposal for his investigation of resources in the region, as well as new maps and navigation charts, to Russia.⁴⁰

The Billings Expedition was another multiyear undertaking, beginning in 1785 and returning in 1795. He was given a Russian cocommander, Gavril Andreevich Sarychev, who had enlisted in the Russian Navy in 1781. The Englishman Martin Sauer was the official secretary of the expedition, and his account of the journey included records from Billings and many other participants, including its naturalists. One of those naturalists, Carl Heinrich Merck, would later write his own narrative. Merck was born in 1761 in Germany and received his medical degree at the University of Jena before entering Russian service. Sarychev, who became an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences upon the expedition's conclusion, would also publish a narrative describing the events.⁴¹

As was the case for the Second Kamchatka or the Pallas Expedition, international interest in this latest effort was high. George Macartney, the British ambassador extraordinary sent to Russia to finalize a new trade treaty in 1786, included an update on the expedition's progress to the foreign secretary in London: “The following is the state of the expedition to those Countries under the Command of Captain Billings. He set out in June 1785. He was to go first to Jakutsk, then to Ochetskoi, then to the River Kolyma, to go down to the Mouth of it, and as far to the Eastward as the Season will permit. In the meanwhile the Ships are getting ready at Ochetskoi, As soon as he can in the Year 1787, he is to sail from Ochetskoi to the harbour of St. Peter and St. Paul.”⁴² Despite this interest, or perhaps because of it, the findings of the expedition were kept private in Russia until the nineteenth century. Sauer would leave Russia and publish his report from Britain in 1802, seven years after the expedition's end, and Sarychev's report would follow from Russia after that.

The absence of an official report immediately following the expedition's return provided Billings with an opportunity to exploit his information to further his career. He provided the EIC an update on his travels and Russia's interest in the North Pacific. It is perfectly in keeping with the history of Russia's naturalists to exploit their discoveries for their own gains, but Billings's actions are notable as he was also involved in delaying Sauer's publication on behalf of the Academy of Sciences.⁴³ Billings provided the East India Company's secretary the details of his instructions: “The Empress” outlined a series of tasks for his expedition. The first were cartographic: “1st to measure by a chain, where it was practicable, the distances between several places which the Empress names in Her Instruction…. 2) To determine the latitude and longitude of places with the utmost exactness…. 3) To make plans, drawings, views, &c.” The second category was designed simply to continue the typical scientific work of the expedition, “To collect specimens of Mineralogy & Natural History.” The third category was intended to investigate the condition of the empire's American subjects: “To enquire into the abuses, and acts of cruelty and oppression, committed by the Russians in those distant parts, on the original inhabitants. The account he gives of the conduct of the Russians towards those poor defenseless people is so shocking, that it appears almost incredible, but horrid as it is, it is corroborated by the testimony of the Russians themselves.” The final category was geopolitical, as Catherine's government was invested in its control of the North Pacific. The expedition should “proceed down the Coast of America as far as Mount Elias. 7) To find a port proper for established an Admiralty for building and repairing ships, both for War and commerce; 8) To discover whether the sea is at anytime open between the Continents of Asia and America, so as to permit a vessel to said round to the West. 9) To go to the utmost northern extreme of Chutkoi (or Tschutka). 10) To determine, as near as possible, the number of Inhabitants in every place he went to. 11) To make an exact survey of the Coast of America, and particularly to give a correct account of the Harbours.” Although the directions provided a detailed explanation of the goals of the expedition, the EIC must have been relieved to hear that Billings “made no discoveries of new lands or islands,” even though he “has gained a more perfect knowledge of all those parts, of which before their notions were very vague and erroneous.” Some of this new information concerned the climate. Billings confirmed that “the Ice never thaws between Cape Chalatskoi and the American Continent,” although “the water is open in summer through the Straits of Behring almost to the point of Chalatskoi.”

Beyond geography, Billings's assessment was not complimentary to Russia's management of its possessions. He found Kamchatka to be “very miserable, and there are only 700 souls remaining of the aborigines, the rest having been extirpated by the Russians.” It was no better on the American side. Billings wrote: “The Russians are depopulating very fast both their own Islands and the Continent of America. In the islands they drive the inhabitant out into the woods to hunt for furs in the most severe weather, where great numbers of them perish. They plunder them of this property and provisions, so that whole families frequently perish by famine. They consistently turn them ill, and often kill them. When the Russians return to their own country they carry of as many women and children as they can conduct, and make slaves of them for their own use, or sell them.” Billings even provided evidence that some of Russia's territorial claims were illegitimate. He confirmed that “the Island which a Russian trade, and an adventurer in those parts pretended to discover,” was in fact “the island of Kirtak (or rather Kistak) discovered by Captain Cook.”⁴⁴ If Billings had been dispatched by the Russian government to produce new maps to confirm their possession in the North Pacific, it seems doubtful it would have been pleased with his confirmation of a British discovery of a contested island.

Billings's information provided to the EIC was no worse than Chappe d’Auteroche's view of Russia's effect on Siberia's population. One difference was that Billings provided this information privately as he sought employment, rather than in print. Billings followed the example of his fellow countrymen, particularly the diplomats, who often criticized Russia in their dispatches to London but who wisely kept these complaints private to avoid the tsar's irritation.

If Billings was so critical of Russia's mismanagement in private, the need for the government to present the expedition as a great achievement was only that much more difficult. Certainly having Sauer depart Russian service, and the empire, before publishing his notes from the expedition added to the concern about how the information could be used. At the same time, Sauer's comments would hardly have been surprising to anyone familiar with the publications of the previous expeditions. In Okhotsk, he lamented the climate: “The air is unwholesome in the extreme, as fogs, mists, and chilling winds, constantly prevail, which so much affect the products of the earth, that nothing grows within five versts of the sea.” The air contributed to the ill health of the inhabitants, who suffered from poor habits as well as geography. Sauer added: “The scurvy rages here with great violence, owing, perhaps, as much to want of attention and cleanliness in the inhabitants, as to the climate.”⁴⁵

Sauer's descriptions of the local populations borrowed from his predecessors and also noted the damage still done by endemic diseases. The Iakuts, for example, “are a healthy and hardy race, bear the extremes of heat and cold to an astonishing degree, and travel in the severest frosts on horseback, frequently suffering much from hunger; they are, however, subject to rheumatic pains, boils, the itch, and fore eyes; and great numbers were carried off in 1758 and 1774 by the small-pox and measles.”⁴⁶ By the time Sauer published, men like Guthrie and Mertens had argued that the Russian population, especially in Siberia, were successfully adapted to their climate. Sauer's comments offered a rebuttal of those comments with a reminder of the devastation of smallpox and the mention of rheumatism, which Guthrie had included in his discussion of Siberian treatments in his 1777 article in Medical and Philosophical Commentaries.⁴⁷

Unlike Pallas and Georgi's expedition, Billings and Sauer traversed the North Pacific, adding Indigenous Alaskans to their description of the peoples of the empire. Although Sauer may have drawn on the preexisting descriptions of the Siberian population, he was breaking new ground for the Indigenous communities of North America. Sauer's portrayals relied on similar language and ideas, but frequently sketched contradictory types of bodies. In Carl Linnaeus's taxonomy, Native Americans were one of the four categories of humankind, separated from Europeans and Asians.⁴⁸ The evidence from the Billings Expedition, however, seemed to describe them as part of a broader mixed category that included many of the peoples of Siberia. On Kodiak Island, for example, Sauer described the male Kodiaks of having two occupations: “The first character, is the athletic and skillful warrior; the second, the fleet and expert hunter; the former enjoys his prisoners and the booty of the enemy; the latter has his wives, labourers, and slaves by purchase, and the ability that he possesses to maintain them.” His description of active, athletic men suggested hot body types, which was potentially surprising considering the location. Kodiak women confirmed this diagnosis, as “the most favoured of women is she who has the greatest number of children.” Fertility was always associated with heat, not cold. The children of Kodiak, however, raised some questions for Sauer, but he blamed the outcome on their childrearing practices: “The women seem very fond of their offspring; dreading the effects of war, and the dangers of the chase; some of them bring up their males in a very effeminate manner, and are happy to see them taken by the chiefs, to gratify their unnatural desires. Such youths are dressed like women, and taught all their domestic duties.”⁴⁹ The Kodiak population were different from those people living in Kamchatka, but Sauer's interest in their physical activities and procreative habits fits neatly into the types of information Russia's naturalists had been recording for decades.

Sauer's choice to first publish his narrative in London in English, instead of through the Russian Academy, raised questions about his intentions. Certainly, he frustrated Billings's interest in furtively passing information to the EIC about Russia's interest in the Pacific by making the expedition's work public. Sauer's account was also followed by the official accounts endorsed by the academy that were published by Sarychev and later Merck. Both accounts did more to confirm Sauer's report than to raise questions of its validity. Sarychev, for example, described Okhotsk in similar terms: “The weather is cold and damp the greater part of the year, and not unfrequently so in that season when heat is indispensable for bringing the corn to maturity. For this reason, the vegetables and garden fruits are far inferior to those in other places lying nearer to the north pole, where, as in Archangel for example, they have a better climate.”⁵⁰ Sauer may have said “nothing” grew in Okhotsk, but Sarychev was hardly complimentary.

Merck's account, like Sauer's, offered ample examples of the widespread disease burden among Russia's subjects. On Kodiak, for example, he noted: “External infections, also in the face, sore throat, abscesses in throat and nose, pain in the bones, deterioration of the bone which causes their bones to break. Syphilis is present from long ago.” Although the pervasive diseases suggested an unhealthy populace, “nevertheless, they do grow old so that they can hardly walk under the burden of years.”⁵¹ Merck may not have published to support Sauer's assessment, but his physical descriptions only confirmed Sauer's belief in the hot qualities of the Kodiaks.

Aside from the common ideas shared among the three men in terms of geography, climate, and population, once scurvy overtook the expedition's crew in the fall of 1790, each narrative focused on uncovering potential scurvy treatments. Both Sauer and Merck quoted one of the crew's surgeons, a Mr. Roebeck: “It was only towards the end of the voyage, when our bread was out, and we were reduced to a short allowance of water, that the scurvy made its appearance. At this time pease and grits boiled to a thick consistency in a small quantity of water, and buttered, were substituted for salted provisions.” In his own remarks, Sauer concluded that the outbreak “arose solely from the carelessness of the men, in going with wet feet. The water was a collection of melted snow, very cold. The weather hazy and damp.” Roebeck had concluded that the scurvy outbreak was primarily linked to the men drinking “very dirty rainwater that had been collected on deck.”⁵²

The Billings crew tried all possible treatments, just as the Second Kamchatka Expedition had: “We had malt, hops, and a considerable quantity of essence of spruce; and beer was brewed for the benefit of all hands, especially the sick. Berries were also administered, and every antiscorbutic that we could procure; but we did not perceive any good arose from it.” With little result from the traditional remedies, many of which had been used unsuccessfully since the seventeenth century, Sauer suggested an alternate solution: “Thinking the best way to guard against it was to copy the natives in their mode of living, I made the chief part of my diet consist of raw fish, muscles, and limpets; using, instead of tea in the morning, a tea-spoonful of essence of spruce in a small tea-kettle full of boiling water; and in the evening, we boiled beer with berries, sugar, and pepper, which, with the addition of some corn-brandy, was our substitute for punch.” By the end of 1790, however, scurvy still overwhelmed his crew despite their preparations. By February 1791, “it raged with unabashed violence; … we sometimes buried three men in one day; and the most athletic in appearance were the earliest victims.”⁵³

The failure to maintain the crew's health was not from lack of interest in local habits. Merck mentioned while on Kamchatka that the Indigenous communities relied on “winter provisions” of “dried, frozen, or salted fish, several kinds of berries, strong leek, and here in addition sarana among other kitchen herbs. So long as these provisions last, these people know nothing of scurvy, not even when in spring (a time when many incline toward laziness because of normally easier access to provisions) the rest of the winter provisions are supplemented with bark peeled from larch trees and willows.”⁵⁴ Sarychev noted the Iukagirs had their own prophylactic: “red bilberries mashed with dried fish, and the fat of fish…. It is reputed to be very salutary against the scurvy.”⁵⁵ Just like the Second Kamchatka Expedition, interest in local cures failed to save the Russia crew from another disaster in the Pacific. Nonetheless, the Billings Expedition contributed to knowledge of scurvy treatments through the sacrifices of its crew.

The Billings Expedition may have begun as a response to the political challenge generated by Cook's third voyage, but the narratives it produced undermined the idea of Russia's success. It generated new navigation charts and maps for the Russian government, but it did not meet its loftier aspirations. The Second Kamchatka Expedition had cooperated with Linnaeus and demonstrated the Russian Empire's value to the progress of science, but the Billings Expedition came up far short and only added new criticism by revealing Russia's limited impact on its far east and North Pacific possessions.

The Billings Expedition relied on an ad hoc response to scurvy, first using known local remedies and then trying any potential solution without great success. The next major expedition, Russia's first circumnavigation (1803–1806), approached scurvy more deliberately with advanced preparations. The doctor accompanying the voyage, Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, who had trained at the University of Göttingen and was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was a product of a long line of German physicians in Russian service. He would be given responsibility for implementing a prophylactic treatment to prevent scurvy during the circumnavigation, but it was not a therapy of his design. The decision appears to have been made by the voyage's leader, Adam Johann Ritter von Krusenstern. Krusenstern was born in Estonia in 1770, and joined the Russian Navy in 1787. He then joined the British Royal Navy in 1793, staying for six years before returning to Russian service. In the Royal Navy, Krusenstern became acquainted with the so-called Cook method of preventing scurvy outbreaks and also became a student of other well-known explorations of the Pacific, including several French and British explorers: Jean François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse; Samuel Wallis, Philip Carteret, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville.⁵⁶ From this practical knowledge, Krusenstern was careful to implement the best practices available. It was not the medical community, but rather the naval one, that successfully brought the new scurvy prophylactics to Russia.

When Krusenstern's two ships departed St. Petersburg in 1803 on his great expedition, he was fully aware of the importance of food preparation. He wrote that he promised to preserve “the health of the crew, from the use of sourcrout and cranberry juice,” as well as tea and sugar, which was well known to be a “healthy and antiscorbutic beverage,” reflecting his implementation of the British naval regulations. Unfortunately, “sufficient attention had not been paid to the choice of casks, the consequence of which was, that a good deal of the provision was destroyed,” including two-thirds of his sauerkraut. Beyond the food, Krusenstern was careful with the overall health of the crew. He provided “an ample provision” of “clothes and linen, as well for warm as cold weather” and was pleased “to see an inclination to cleanliness in all of them.” To guarantee healthful behavior, he “examined them twice a week, took notice of their linen and clothes, and particularly of the cleanliness of their persons.” The preparations may have helped the crew avoid a crisis in the Atlantic, allowing them to reach Hawai‘i without incident. Upon his arrival there, Krusenstern noted that “my people are healthy; but in a long voyage like this, during which, except the first weeks after our departure from Brazil, they had had no other provisions than salt meat.”⁵⁷

Krusenstern's preparations, however, failed to inspire sweeping reforms against scurvy in Russia's Pacific. Visiting Kamchatka and later Russian America, Krusenstern and Langsdorff would be horrified by the pervasiveness of scurvy throughout Russian territory. One of the ships of the Russian American Company he encountered, the Maria, was filled with a scurvy-stricken crew living in miserable conditions. Krusenstern found them living in “shocking, disgusting state, … nearly all appeared to labour under incurable scorbutic and venereal sores, although they had been ten months on shore, and had enjoyed the assistance of the surgeon of [the outposts at] St. Peter and St. Paul.” The causes were clear to Krusenstern—that is, the “extremely pernicious” climate of the north Pacific, coupled with “filthiness and laziness.” Although these causes looked back to the most traditional ideas of the cause of scurvy, Krusenstern knew that proper food could be a cure, leading him to inspect the available provisions, which was only salted meat: “On opening a cask so disgusting and pestilential a smell took possession of the hold as compelled me instantly to quit it.”⁵⁸ The lack of antiscorbutics, either traditional or more recent options (like cranberry juice), coupled with the miasmatic air of rancid meat, left little chance of recovery for the victims.

Krusenstern left Kamchatka for his diplomatic mission in Japan, leaving the other ship, the Neva, under the direction of his second-in-command, Iurii Fedorovich Lisianskii. Born in Ukraine, Lisianskii also joined the Russian Navy at a young age and followed this experience with six years in the British Royal Navy. Lisianskii was given the task of inspecting Russian America, from the Aleutian Islands south to California. Throughout the voyage along the coast of Alaska, scurvy was an endemic problem, partially caused by the lack of proper provisions from Kamchatka. The crew took advantage of a short stay on the island of St. Paul to gather “fresh provisions for our diseased and half-starved crew,” the flesh of sea-bear and birds’ eggs. As Langsdorff noted: “It was indeed not a little striking to see the change that a few days of better feeding made in these miserable people. The scurvy visibly decreased, and a vivacity and joviality hitherto unknown was observable among them.” This was unfortunately a temporary solution, however, as the “most afflicted” with the disease would be left behind on Kodiak Island and were replaced with local men. Their provisions were restocked with fresh fish and “good water”⁵⁹

Scurvy became an inescapable part of the crew's life for the rest of their voyage, in a remarkable change from the first half of the voyage from St. Petersburg to Kamchatka. Langsdorff believed that wintering on Sitka Island left the crew with little chance to escape, despite having selected “the youngest and most healthy men” for the voyage (figure 6.2). It was their lifestyle on the island that was to blame, as the crew had “not the remotest idea of cleanliness,” and frequently “came home in the evening wet through, perhaps covered with snow, and lay down upon the beds in their wet cloaths, … without any one appearing to think of the pernicious consequences that might ensue.” As a result, scurvy “shewed itself first by debility, listlessness, and melancholy; inflammatory spots, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, then appeared on the legs from the knees to the toes.”⁶⁰ The argument that melancholy preceded physical symptoms appeared frequently in the eighteenth century, although in this case its inclusion seemed to be as much for narrative effect as a physical description of the symptoms.

Figure 6.2. Krusenstern's circumnavigation highlighted Russia's progress in North America, featuring the new settlement in Sitka. “Harbour of New Archangel in Sitca or Norfolk Sound,” Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections, accessed June 9, 2024, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7b43-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

At this point, Langsdorff suggested the Russian American Company's resistance toward treatment was the key for the lack of treatment, which did place the blame on the company rather than on the state or himself as the physician on the scene. He tried the traditional solutions, including an attempt to establish a “dry, warm, airy, and clean apartment allotted to the sick,” but his voice “was too weak to be heard.” Failing that, he tried better food, “representing that sugar, rice, molasses, and other wholesome kinds of nourishment, were of more importance to the sick than medicine, and that a wholesome liquor might be made for them to drink from spruce-fir with molasses.” Unfortunately, the company's managers rejected this offer as well, suggesting that it “must be a pretty doctor who would cure his patients with good eating and drinking, instead of medicine.” Sadly, it is also unlikely the local medicines would have provided any relief. As Langsdorff noted, the available medicine consisted of “steel-filings, juniper-berries, essence of spruce, of which there were several poods, calcareous powders, and other things of the same kind; not an emetic or purgative medicine, no opium, nor any preparations of mercury, not any in short of the most important and useful medicines.”⁶¹

The circumnavigation differed from the earlier academy expeditions. The Russian Navy led the Second Kamchatka and Billings Expeditions, but medical decisions had been led by the naturalists and physicians, whereas Krusenstern set the course for scurvy mitigation instead of his physician. This may explain why the search for local cures, which had been so prominent in the earlier expeditions, did not appear to interest the crew of the circumnavigation. If the earlier expeditions created opportunities for scientific discoveries, gathering insight on local products and potential commodities, and uncovered regional medical treatments, this nineteenth-century undertaking focused on imperial control over North America and foreign trade in the Pacific Ocean as its main objectives. It was not the only change, but it does suggest that improving health and mastering the climate did not hold the same priority for the state as it had in the eighteenth century.

Guthrie wrote about Russia's climate one final time, in a manuscript that remained unfinished when he died in 1807. In its introduction, Guthrie stated that he undertook this project to respond to Russia's critics who still believed in climate determinism, those who argued that “a People living under rigorous Climate, and despotic government with a state of compleat Vassalage, … [led] a life of Langour, Sufferance and Misery, in perfect ignorance and Barbarity.” In response to those critics, Guthrie offered “real and actual observations” of those “living under frigid Climate, and absolute government, who resembled the Freeman of Greece, than the desponding laws which had represented him. That he is endowed, with a Sensible gayty, dexterity, that he is born a Musician, passionately fond of a line of Poetry, of Amusements, and Stage plays.”⁶² Much of his text was devoted to the connection between contemporary Russia and classical Greece, with a particular focus on the arts. For Guthrie, Russia's rich cultural tradition disproved any belief in climate determinism; the cold climate did not have a negative impact on Russians.

Furthermore, Guthrie discussed at length the importance of the bania for Russians of all ranks, once again arguing that the extreme heat prevented the danger of putrefaction in the body. Russia's bania was “a Vapour Bath which a man must be accustomed to from his infancy to relish or you are obliged whilst in it to breath Vapour instead of Air, raised by throwing Water on red hot stones.” The benefit for all Russians was clear, as “this practice of hardening men by exactly the same process that we harden steel, has a happy effect on the Russian Constitution, gradually inured to it from the day of their Birth for it is to the Banoi (as they calle it) a Woman repairs, with her in fact the very day she is delivered and often repairs there whilst in Labour to facilitate delivery.”⁶³ His arguments closely resembled those offered on the Second Kamchatka Expedition, if not earlier. Despite his multiple publications on Russians’ ability to manage their environment, even at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Guthrie felt it was necessary to reiterate these same ideas.

Guthrie's intention to prove once again that the Russian Empire had overcome its climate challenge was not unnecessary. Critics of Russia's management of its empire continued to emphasize the state's failure both to improve the health of its population and to utilize its resources more effectively. Some of these critics were foreign like Lesseps, but increasingly some worked for the Russian government, like Sauer and Krusenstern. Texts from both the Billings Expedition and the circumnavigations relied on familiar tropes to describe and classify the peoples of the North Pacific and observed common diseases that still included scurvy, syphilis, and smallpox. Even if these expeditions were intended to highlight the empire's successes, the similarity of the images, language, and ideas produced during these voyages with that of the Second Kamchatka Expedition produced an impression that little had changed in decades.

An additional challenge emerged at the dawn of the century for Russia's physicians beyond the empire's critics. Disease theory was changing. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, putrefaction was widely accepted as a major cause of disease, making a cold climate extremely dangerous. As contagious or miasmatic vectors for disease transmission were more widely accepted, the climate was less of a particular risk. The multiple theories of the origin of the Russian catarrh demonstrated the progress of those new ideas by the 1780s. This raised a new question for the new century: If the climate was not the cause of Russia's unhealthy empire, then what was to blame? Critics of the empire may have blamed the tsar and his government for Russia's mismanagement of its land and peoples. Russia's defenders, like Guthrie, not only had to highlight the empire's achievements in public health but also had to respond to these political issues. Guthrie's intention with his final manuscript was to address both, but sadly, it remained unfinished at the time of his death. When Guthrie was writing in the first decade of the new century, however, all the information necessary to offer a defense of Russia's successes existed. It is not hard to understand why no one immediately accepted the task following Guthrie's death. The general confusion of the Napoleonic era, including the French invasion of Russia in 1812, was not an auspicious time to produce a comprehensive history of the empire's climate and its progress in public health. There may have been new interest in the consequences of a cold climate after 1812, but the decimation of the Grand Armée was now far more relevant than Russia's imperial challenges.