Europe's Laboratory (eBook)

Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Matthew P. Romaniello (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
264 Seiten
Northern Illinois University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5017-8393-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Europe's Laboratory is a history of eighteenth-century naturalists and physicians who were involved in the creation of a classification system for the people of the Russian Empire. These Enlightened scholars traveled through Russia describing its people, landscape, and customs. In an era when climate was seen as a significant factor affecting health and bodies, these men wondered: How did the Russians, a "cold" people—phlegmatic or melancholic, according to humoral theory—manage an empire?

Russia's empire, as Matthew P. Romaniello shows, contradicted the medical knowledge reflecting centuries of experimentation and practice. In solving this riddle, naturalists and physicians would unlock the secret of Russia's success and create a typology of imperial bodies, a guide toward managing the empire's diversity, to prepare Russia for greater successes in the nineteenth century. Rather than an underpopulated region of unambitious people, eighteenth-century Russia was a dynamic empire that mastered skills to support settler colonialism in climates unfamiliar to other Europeans. Europe's Laboratory makes a significant contribution to the most understudied era of Russian history while engaging the broader, global debates on the formation of race theory in colonial contexts.

Autor

Matthew P. Romaniello is Chair and Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. He is the author of The Elusive Empire and Enterprising Empires and spent a decade as the editor of the Journal of World History.

Inhalt

Introduction
1. Experiencing Climate, Observing People
2. Training Physicians, Exchanging Information
3. Describing Kamchatka, Documenting Scurvy
4. Improving Health, Inoculating Smallpox
5. Surviving Plague, Mixing Races
6. Analyzing Catarrh, Overcoming Climate
Epilogue

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.11.2025
• Reihe/Serie: NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
• Zusatzinfo: 14 b&w halftones
• Verlagsort: Ithaca
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: Western medicine, settler colonialism, Russian Empire, Siberia, nutritional diseases, pandemic history, Napoleon, medical education
• ISBN-10: 1-5017-8393-9 / 1501783939
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-8393-7 / 9781501783937