Introduction
Tsar Alexander I's personal physician, Alexander Crichton, arrived in Russia from Britain in 1803 and would go on to serve the tsar for two decades. In the wake of Napoleon's invasion, Crichton published an account of an experimental treatment for consumption he had developed during his time in the capital. Crichton's study offered an answer as to how Russia's subjects remained so healthy in a land known for its extremely cold weather, which recently devastated the Grande Armée. Crichton acknowledged: “Consumption is infinitely more frequent in Great Britain and Ireland, in comparison of their population, than in the northern parts of Russia, yet the climate of Russia is in general infinitely colder and ruder than ours.” Not only was the disease less common than expected but also Russian peasants recovered from consumption at a better rate than the British did. Crichton explained: “Whether this arises from the constant warmth in which the Russian lives, the frequent use of his vapour bath, or from the poverty of his diet, I do not pretend to say, but the fact is so; and to this difference of constitution, and other adventitious circumstances to be mentioned hereafter, the greater success in curing this class of patients may, perhaps, be owing.”1 Crichton also acknowledged that Russia's climate was dangerous, but he was confident that Russia's peasants had adapted successfully to its environment.
2. Crichton expected his audience to understand that Britain had a temperate climate but that leaving its shores for any distant land meant exposure to intemperate conditions, risking one's health. Crichton accepted this idea, documenting Russia's dangerous climate while noting the Russians’ ability to thrive in this extreme environment. An intemperate climate, in fact, offered an opportunity for those adapted to its distinct aspects, whereas those who were unsuited to it, as the French army had been, suffered and died from the same conditions (figure I.1).
Figure I.1. Christian Wilhelm von Faber du Faur, “Between Braunsberg and Elbing. Officers and soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Armée with a sleigh outside an inn,” in Blaetter aus meinem Portfeuille, im Laufe des Feldzugs 1812 in Russland (Stuttgart: C. F. Autenrieth, 1831–1834). From the British Library Archive.
Climate and health were linked concepts before Crichton wrote at the dawn of the nineteenth century, as it was an intrinsic part of the prevailing medical system, humoral theory. Climate and health had been associated as early as Hippocrates's well-known On Airs, Waters, and Places and was adopted and expanded on by Galen's time in classical Rome. Crichton, like most physicians working in the long eighteenth century, relied on a more recent advocate of the theory, the famous English physician Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham published extensively on his investigation of the causes of diseases in the late seventeenth century; his ideas would inspire a system of disease classification that would be 3. known as nosology. Sydenham argued that understanding climatological conditions was necessary to understand disease outbreaks. In fact, these conditions may have been the most important aspect: “We must confess, that the above-mention’d Qualities of the Air do more or less dispose our Bodies to generate this or that Epidemick Disease.” He claimed certain endemic diseases recurred in particular seasons, because of seasonal climate changes. For the British, he explained, measles and malaria appeared in January or February, “yet they also withdraw at the approach of the Summer Solstice. But others that begin in the Spring increase daily, and do not come to their State till the Autumnal Aequinox, which being past, they begin to retreat, and at length are extinguish’d by the cold of Winter. Of this kind is the Plague and Small-Pox, in those Years they are Epidemical.”2 Sydenham's association of season and disease may seem unscientific to a modern audience, but his nosological categorization of diseases underlay the medical curriculum for more than a century following its publication. Every physician working in the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century, including Crichton at the dawn of the nineteenth, was familiar with the principle that climate and health were linked and accepted that certain climates produced disease in specific seasons.
Crichton's publication recorded his clinical trials to treat consumption. Every spring, he observed, a consumption outbreak arrived in St. Petersburg. Consumption, like all pulmonary conditions, was known to be a “cold disease,” in other words, a disease produced by a cold climate.3 Plague outbreaks were not unknown in Russia, occurring three times in the eighteenth century alone, but medical authorities in the empire argued for a minimal response, quite confident that the arrival of winter would defeat an improbable hot disease inside the empire.4 More attention was always paid to the endemic disease burden, particularly scurvy, syphilis, and smallpox. The Russian Empire as a whole, with its great northern expanse, regularly produced outbreaks of scurvy, arguably the best-known cold disease of the eighteenth century.5 Syphilis was declared more than once to be unsolvable because suffering from a hot disease (as it was centered on a man's genitals, the source of a body's heat) in a cold climate meant the environment could not offer any effective treatment. When Russia began its smallpox inoculation trials after 1768, however, it offered a glimmer of hope for untreatable diseases. As inoculation expanded, the empire took its first important steps to improve the health of its subjects. If smallpox could be managed, could new solutions for scurvy and syphilis be far behind?
4. An increasing numbers of studies have examined Europe's encounters and adaptations to hot climates in the early modern era, including Karen Ordahl Kupperman's work on the Atlantic world and Mark Harrison's study of India.6 Europeans emigrated from temperate conditions at home to intemperate climates in the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. English settlers in the Caribbean, for example, considered surviving malaria a necessary “seasoning” process to become adapted to unhealthy conditions.7 The Atlantic slave trade was motivated in part by the European certainty that African bodies were better suited toward labor in tropical climates.8 Russia offered European empires an intriguing counterstudy: what happened in an extremely cold climate? Physicians at work in Europe wrote to their colleagues in Russia with questions on the health challenges of the cold empire. Physicians working in Russia published their case notes and observations in multiple languages across Europe as proof of their expertise on the topic. When Crichton wrote about consumption in 1823, part of the task was to prove that Russia had mastered another endemic challenge.
Writing about climate and health in the Russian Empire over the long eighteenth century, therefore, is as much about European global colonial strategies as it is about Russia specifically. The empire offered physicians a specialized laboratory that could inform ongoing discussions about health and disease. For the British at work in the Russian Empire, the most prominent of whom were the tsar's personal physicians like Crichton, information from Russia only gained greater currency after the British acquisition of Canada from France following the Seven Years’ War. In other words, working within the Russian Empire assisted not only the Russian government by improving health outcomes for its subjects but also other colonial projects. Imperial science did not stop at geographic borders.
Sharing Knowledge, Improving Empire
The early modern era was defined, in part, by two linked processes: European expansion with its goal of empire-building; and the climatological crisis of the Little Ice Age and its influence on the lived experiences of people around the globe, including recurring famines and pandemics. The Little Ice Age extended from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century, but the 1630s and 1640s were particularly traumatic in the northern hemisphere. The nadir of solar radiation reaching the Earth, 5. combined with multiple massive volcanic eruptions in Southeast Asia, led to one of the coldest decades in centuries. Famines were rampant throughout Europe, causing multiple disease outbreaks, including typhus and the plague. The years 1648 and 1649 were rife with global political revolts, several of which began as food riots that expanded into other complaints against inadequate governments.9 Russia was not immune to these effects, with riots against the tsar beginning in Moscow in 1648 and spreading as far away as Siberia in 1649.10 Russia's political upheaval was followed by a plague outbreak in the mid-1650s, which also was linked to poor health from limited food supplies.11
What historians might conclude was a logical connection between climatological disasters and political and social consequences was not clear to contemporaries living in this era. Observing a lengthy winter or cool summer was not immediately connected to a disease outbreak at the time, but the unpredictable weather of that era provides an explanation of why discussions of the climate were so common among European writers. Although interest in the Little Ice Age and its consequences on historical events has been increasing in the modern era, much of what has been published has approached the issue as a particular colonial challenge. The surprise of leaving Britain and arriving in a different climate, particularly a warmer climate, frequently featured in British travel narratives to the colonies. In the eighteenth century, Britain's massive acquisition of Canada from France at the end of the Seven Years’ War sparked a new curiosity about the challenges of leaving temperate Britain for a notably cold region. The health challenges for Canadian settlers were necessarily different than those for Jamaican or South African colonizers.12
British physicians had a long experience of living in a cold space to draw on—the Russian Empire. Following the English arrival in Russia in the sixteenth century, the tsars frequently hired English and Scottish physicians for the court.13 Well positioned at the center of the Russian Empire, physicians and naturalists in Britain did not hesitate to ask their colleagues working in Moscow, and later St. Petersburg, for advice on the experience of cold. Robert Boyle relied on Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich's doctor, Samuel Collins, to conduct experiments on the consequences of cold temperatures on air pressure in the 1650s.14 When Dr. James Lind was completing his famous Treatise on Scurvy in 1753, he similarly relied on another British physician in Russia, John Cook, for his expert knowledge from having treated multiple disease outbreaks while working as a military physician in the Baltic Region.15 6. Once Britain acquired Canada in 1763, the interest in cold climates was no longer a scientific curiosity but rather an imperial necessity.
Russia and Canada may have been understood by the British as cold spaces, but without question, the focus of most European empires was squarely placed on even warmer and tropical environments. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands may have each taken part in Europe's expansion across the Atlantic and into the Indian Ocean, but their common interest was commercial products. The perception was that tropical agricultural products and Asian finished goods were more valuable than the potential exports from cold environments. The reality is the British Russia Company was the second-most-profitable British trading company in the eighteenth century, after the East India Company, but far ahead of all the others.16 Historians have generally followed the expressed interest of their sources in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into tropical climates rather than into the colder ones. This has been important work, but it is simply impossible to understand the consequences of Europe's colonial ambitions without considering a more inclusive approach that accommodates all of Europe's entanglements.
This goal of this book, therefore, is to situate Russia and its imperial subjects as part of the ongoing discussions of Europe's empires. The Russian Empire was valued in scientific and medical circles as a distinct environment that offered expansive opportunities for observation and bioprospecting, both of which contributed to knowledge of the natural world.17 The numerous publications by Russia's physicians that appeared in Britain, France, and Germany, among other countries, demonstrates the value of this project across Europe. Russia's physicians and naturalists did not operate outside of the main events of European history, but rather were active and integrated participants.
The physicians and naturalists working in Russia contributed to several key debates in early-modern Europe that influenced colonial enterprises, not only climate and geography but also health and demographic challenges, both for settlers and the Indigenous communities. One of the recurring issues in understanding the material generated by imperial observers is the way this knowledge was mediated through European, and frequently West European, lenses. Numerous authors have considered critically the ways this knowledge was produced and conceptualized to fit within existing frames of reference and hierarchies.18 Postcolonial approaches to Western knowledge offer some 7. opportunities to revisit and rethink the language chosen and how certain ideas were embedded, including a turn toward racialization as the eighteenth century progressed.19 Important consideration has also been given to how Western observers could sexualize the objects of their encounter.20 None of these texts can be taken at face value.
Even with reasonable concerns about the preconceptions, misinformation, and outright bias against non-Western subjects, physicians and naturalists working in this era made significant contributions toward the production of new scientific and medical information.21 In an Atlantic context, it is unsurprising how the construction of race and its explicit connection to the exploitation of unfree labor has received the most attention.22 Considering the work of this community of physicians in Russia in the same era provides an opportunity to reevaluate this Atlantic work by understanding its impact in a different racial and ethnic context, particularly as it was generated by the multiple peoples living across the vast expanse of Siberia.
In the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire was unquestionably one of the world's largest by area, albeit with a smaller population than most of the other European empires and even further behind the great empires of Asia. European perception of a population gap posed a significant challenge for Russian authorities, who encountered regular criticism of Russia's empty or barren spaces. Settler colonialism could offer an opportunity to work this land and exploit the empire's numerous resources, but the Russian government did not suddenly embrace a freedom of movement for its subjects.23 If anything, the state became increasingly restrictive following the formalization of enserfment in 1649 until the loosening of these legal regulations in the middle of the nineteenth century. When foreign critics of the empire remarked on its emptiness, this was a result not only of a health crisis, a difficult climate, and a stretched food supply but also of the legal and social reality of the Russian state. To a degree, this can make it difficult to separate commentary on Russian politics, economic structures, and imperial government from debates about health and climate; these issues were connected. Ample historiographical discussions exist, however, on the tsars, society, and politics, and even important interventions for the problematic observations of contemporary Europeans on those issues.24 This book, therefore, does not need to reassess these thoroughly studied topics but rather will focus on the two issues yet to be fairly examined: climate and health. It builds on a small but important historiography, including studies by Ryan Tucker Jones and Hans 8. Vermeulen, who have published the work of the Academy of Sciences and their foreign experts in the period.25
The Academy of Sciences, however, is not the central institution of this study but rather one of the employers of this book's actual subjects—the physicians who were working in Russia during the eighteenth century and their public health interventions.26 Although earlier studies examined the history of medicine in Russia in the eighteenth century, those scholars did not approach the topic as a colonial issue.27 The exception is Clare Griffin's work, but her focus is on pharmaceutical products and trade rather than on settler colonialism or disease outbreaks.28 Extensive work on the effects of the cold climate on Russia's populations also remains lacking.29
There is an established history for the idea of public health in the eighteenth century as part of the Enlightenment project. It would not be until 1776 when the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that achieving the “greatest happiness for the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” but this principal underlay many of the ideas circulating throughout the Enlightenment.30 The application of reason to social problems, in theory, produced greater happiness for society. The application of new ideas in science and medicine to produce better health outcomes follows the same principle. Improving the health of the empire, and increasing the size of its population, were common goals across Europe. Considering how these goals were accomplished in a cold empire during the Little Ice Age, however, is a unique story.
The Cold Empire
This book is a study of climate, health, and empire, but it examines how these issues were framed by the public discussions in the eighteenth century. Therefore, I begin with an analysis of a particular system of rhetoric, promoted through a series of published narratives in the long eighteenth century. It is an analysis of the development of medical and scientific knowledge in consideration of how these ideas were mediated by an established system of rhetoric relied on by physicians and naturalists. It is not a book about class, gender, or nationality, although literacy was a prerequisite for participation in the system of rhetoric that tends to reify the importance of wealth and status. This system of rhetoric was based on humoral principles, which continued to define peoples and spaces long after scientists became more skeptical about the scientific 9. validity of those ideals. The public, and published, discussion was led by physicians and naturalists, some working for the Russian government at the Academy of Sciences and the College of Medicine, but some outside the empire offering more pointed critiques. A private, and unpublished, discussion paralleled the other, led by diplomats and merchants working inside the Russian Empire, who attempted to describe and understand its populations.
The exchange of knowledge in the public and private spheres was not separate. The physician Johann Amman, for example, was one of the first botanists of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He published his research on Russia's and Siberia's plants, highlighting their distinct ability to survive cold temperatures. He relied on British merchants to exchange his Russian materials with the Royal Society in London. Those merchants worked both for themselves and for the British government, slipping in and out of the role of British consul to the Russian court. Johann Georg Gmelin, a physician and botanist working for the Russian Academy as part of the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–1743), published a narrative of the expedition and his multivolume Flora Sibirica, while privately debating with Dr. Carl Linnaeus about his new taxonomic system. Amman and Gmelin, therefore, both participated in a public discussion about science and health and privately corresponded with key figures across Europe.
Part 1 of the book considers the way the production of knowledge was limited by the choice of men who worked for the empire and the way in which they were educated; these limits tended to produce familiar types of information for an established audience. Chapter 1 unpacks the rhetoric that the medical and scientific community used to describe the peoples, lands, and environments of Russia. Although eighteenth-century science had evolved from traditional humoral ideas, physicians, and physicians working as naturalists, relied on the language of humoralism to denote the importance of climate, diet, activity and rest, and sex and reproduction (the so-called nonnaturals). The resulting observations expected an audience who understood the significance of this specific idiom. This first chapter documents the evolution of the naturalists’ rhetoric that inscribed a certain type of medical knowledge on the body of the tsar's subjects. Russia was a cold place, as much as the empire's specialists may have resisted the label. European scientists accordingly turned toward Russia as a laboratory for cold experiments.
Chapter 2 discusses the evolution of the medical curriculum and practice from traditional humoral theory to incorporate innovations in 10. anatomy, chemistry, and botany, including the implementation of Dr. Herman Boerhaave's medical curriculum at Leiden. Physicians and naturalists working in Russia were trained in Boerhaave's system, creating a body of knowledge that became the foundation of health interventions in the empire. By connecting a collective biography of the physicians working for the Russian state with the medical curriculum that produced their knowledge, this chapter highlights overlapping personal and educational networks that created a select group of professionals whose work defined the operation of empire. This group guided the ongoing debates about climate and health for the next century.
Part 2 moves beyond the established information networks to consider the ways in which the knowledge these men produced was implemented, not only in Russia but also across Europe and its empires. Empress Catherine I, Peter the Great's widow, opened the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1725. It provided the leadership for the Second Kamchatka Expedition, the scientific expedition in which Vitus Bering mapped the Strait that would later be named in his honor. Chapter 3 uses the establishment of the academy and the rich ethnographic texts produced by the expedition to explore Russia's contribution toward Carl Linnaeus's new taxonomic system. The Second Kamchatka Expedition became defined by its struggles to manage scurvy, which resulted in Bering's death among numerous others. By searching for local remedies across the empire and gathering extensive data on the progress of the disease, Russia's ability to manage its recurring scurvy outbreaks was established across Europe. In Britain, as James Lind prepared his famous Treatise of Scurvy, he corresponded with a colleague in Russia to uncover the latest information on the disease. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in other words, Russia's medical establishment was contributing actively to ongoing taxonomic and medical research in Sweden and Britain.
If its contributions to scurvy reflected a breakthrough, setbacks quickly followed. Foreign critics, primarily from France, published a series of attacks in the middle of the century, outlining the ongoing danger of Russia's climate on the health of its population. In 1761, Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, one of the few Frenchmen ever to conduct scientific work in early-modern Russia, published a scathing assessment of Russia's mismanagement of its peoples and resources. In 1762, Catherine the Great's coup not only overthrew her husband but also marked the beginning of her active involvement of repudiating the claims of Chappe d’Auteroche. In quick succession, Catherine's 11. government laid out a new medical curriculum in her famous Instruction, required the Academy of Sciences to launch an extensive translation program to make major scientific and medical works available in Russian to the literate public, and even used her own body as a site for an experimental procedure—smallpox variolation. Chapter 4 analyzes the method by which Catherine's government implemented a series of health interventions to increase the size of Russia's population.
If Catherine's smallpox campaign was a notable peak in Russia's positive health interventions, it was immediately undermined by the largest health crisis of the century—the arrival of the bubonic plague in Moscow. Following months of denial of its arrival, the state acted to respond only when the plague threatened its foreign trade. Most important, local physicians in Moscow credited the arrival of the cold as the solution to the plague, arguing that the climate could in fact defeat this dangerous threat. This incident marks the beginning of part 3, in which Russia's climatological and health challenges led its specialists to challenge, and even reject, established knowledge in Western Europe. This catastrophe undoubtedly contributed to a new focus on verifying the benefits or risks of Russia's climate for the health of its population in chapter 5. A new academy expedition, led by Dr. Peter Simon Pallas, reinvestigated the empire in a similar way to the Second Kamchatka Expedition decades earlier. Russia's physicians, including Dr. Matthew Guthrie, began to publish positive assessments of the Russians’ ability to manage their health despite the endemic dangers of scurvy and syphilis, among others. By 1781, when Catherine sponsored the second major smallpox inoculation event, this time for her grandchildren, it appeared the Russian government had restored some of its progressive accomplishments despite the damage of the plague in 1771. Unfortunately, a global catarrh pandemic that began in Russia late in 1781 and overtook Europe and the Atlantic world in 1782 once again revealed Russia as a source of dangerous diseases in chapter 6. The label “Russian Catarrh” emerged from the idea that cold spaces like Russia generated cold diseases, particularly those affecting the lungs, such as catarrh. Guthrie would spend the next decade trying to prove that Russia's climate was not unhealthy, producing his “Dissertation on the Climate of Russia” (1790) as his final argument.31 New scientific expeditions launched by the Russian Academy also gathered more evidence to prove that Russia's population could thrive in its environment, even suggesting that if there was a challenge it was in distant Kamchatka or the North Pacific islands.
12. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, therefore, the Russian scientific and medical establishment may have mitigated its disease burden, but Russia's foreign critics still held doubts. The Napoleonic invasion and the subsequent destruction of the Grand Armée obviously placed the European-wide discussion about Russia's climate and its dangers at the forefront of medical concerns. Much of the discussion after Napoleon's invasion was on uncovering Russian peasants’ habits that allowed them to survive and thrive in a place so inhospitable to others, as Crichton had demonstrated. France's physicians tended to endorse the conclusion of Russia's eighteenth-century physicians, including Guthrie, but critics of Russia remained vocal. Crichton's work on consumption was even condemned as quackery.32 Europe's perception of the positive improvements to health implemented across the previous century were quickly undone, not by the failure of the Russian government or its employees but rather by outside opinions. This should not undermine the accomplishments of the eighteenth century. In fact, it highlights how important it is to reclaim this narrative.