ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began as an accident. For my first sabbatical from University of Hawai‘i, I planned my new project to be a study of tobacco consumption in the Russian Empire. That idea was a result of reading travel narratives about Russia, which provided some insight into imperial habits that I had not expected. I have a vivid memory of working my way through Johann Gottlieb Georgi's multivolume description of the empire and thinking that his extensive comments about the populations should really be its own book. The other part was that what I was teaching at Hawai‘i had evolved. One of my courses was on Renaissance and Reformation Europe, which first I taught as a course on gender in the early modern era, then as a course on sexuality, and then as a course on early modern medicine. Driven by student interest, I started teaching history of medicine more often, adding courses on early modern medicine, colonial medicine, and the history of human diseases. After my sabbatical in 2013–2014 (when I was conducting the research on tobacco that eventually turned into Enterprising Empires), I realized that the descriptions of the empire I had been reading fit into a discussion with all the colonial medicine texts I was using in class. The Russian Empire's absence in those studies was confusing, because its physicians were produced by the same medical schools and published in the same eighteenth-century journals. Addressing that gap became the motive for this book.

Some of the research for this book was completed during my sabbatical from Hawai‘i in 2013–2014. I still owe thanks to the History Department and the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa for providing that opportunity. Hawai‘i also provided leave in 2017–2018 so that I could have a full year to work on this book on a fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. It was a productive year, but finishing this book was delayed for some unexpected reasons, beginning with leaving my job at Hawai‘i for my current position at Weber State University. A return to the archives in Scotland in 2018 raised some new questions to consider, as I wondered if the physicians’ networks and private exchanges were as central to this story as their publications. My intention to return to the archives in the summer of 2020 to answer that question was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. When I finally returned to the archives in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2022 and then again in the spring of 2023, I finished the research, but the enforced delay in completing the book allowed its focus to evolve. It is far better because of this extended delay, but I never expected to take this long on a book that I thought was nearly finished in 2018.

I am greatly indebted to all those who helped over the past decade. This includes staffs of the National Archives in Kew, the British Library, the Royal Society for Arts Archive, the Wellcome Library, the Bedfordshire Archive, the National Records of Scotland, and the National Library of Scotland. Equally important may be the opportunities to discuss this project in multiple presentations since 2014 at conferences and several invited lectures. It started at University of Hawai‘i after my long-ago sabbatical, then at Weber State and Utah State University on two separate trips in 2016, University of Toronto in 2018, and Ohio State University in 2024. I also benefited from the opportunity to present at the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions in 2014; Social History of Medicine's biennial meeting at University of Oxford later that year; Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in 2015 and via Zoom in 2020; the Association for the History of Medicine's annual meeting in Los Angeles in 2018; and the Study Group on Eighteenth Century Russia in 2022. I thank all the participants of those panels for their suggestions and advice over the years.

The final version of this book also benefited from my participation in a series of different workshops in the past decade. In 2014, Fran Bernstein, Chris Burton, and Dan Healey organized a meeting at Oxford on Continuity and Change in Russian Therapy and graciously invited me to join even though I had only just begun working on the history of medicine. I will always remember the suggestion made at the Russian History Desert Workshop held at Arizona State in 2019, organized by Laurie Manchester, for encouraging me to think about reorganizing the book from its history of disease orientation to instead foreground the multiple narratives generated by the academy's expeditions in the eighteenth century. Andy Bruno and Pey-Yi Chu invited me to join their workshop at the University of Illinois on Climate and Society in Eurasia in 2020 and 2021, which nudged me toward the final version of this book. Johanna Conterio invited me to join her workshop on Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia held at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, which provided an opportunity to rethink the role of Linnaeus and his taxonomy.

No less important were the opportunities created by organizing workshops and panels that allowed me to think through this material in different contexts. Trish Starks and I held a series of panels at ASEEES on the history of senses that became a volume, including my first article on the experience of the cold in Russia. In 2018, I worked alongside Jane Hacking and Jeff Hardy to organize Asia in the Russian Imagination at University of Utah, where I presented an early version of chapter 1. In 2023, Alison Smith, Trish Starks, and I held a workshop on the cold in Russia at University of Toronto, which provided an opportunity for me to receive feedback on a draft of the introduction of this book. I also have to thank the other fellows at the Tanner Humanities Center in 2017–2018, as enjoying the time to develop and discuss the ideas of the first version of this book was particularly essential to the final product. Kevin Coe from Communications, Jeremy Rosen and Jessica Straley from English, and Danielle Olden from History all contributed toward a productive year.

There are too many people to thank who have influenced my thoughts and arguments in both small and large ways; the audiences for the talks and papers mentioned here is only a partial acknowledgment. Trish Starks and Alison Smith have read and commented on the entire manuscript more than once. Clare Griffin read the first two chapters several years ago, providing some incisive comments that led to one of the major shifts in the book's focus. My colleagues at Weber State have graciously let me ramble on about climate and disease over the past six years and helped push this book over the finish line. I am appreciative that James Almeida and Stephen Francis willingly read a new draft of the introduction at the eleventh hour. I am grateful for all their support.

My first thoughts on humoral bodies in the Russian Empire were published in an article, “Humoral Bodies in Cold Climates,” included in Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present, edited by Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks, for Bloomsbury Academic in 2016. The first part of chapter 6 shares material with my article, “The Influential Influenza: The ‘Russian Catarrh’ Pandemic of 1781–1782,” which was published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 79 (2024). I should also thank the New York Public Library for its extraordinary digital collections, which greatly enhanced the final version of this text.

Finally, this book has traveled a lengthy road toward publication. I owe a great debt to Amy Farranto, Christine Worobec, and the reader for the press for their guidance. The final version of the monograph is much stronger for their recommendations.

None of this would have been possible without the support of my family on the East Coast and in Utah. My greatest debt of appreciation is always for Paul Hibbeln, because his support and encouragement make everything possible.