Dissertationsprojekt

Russian Imperial Medicine at Sea: Naval Hygiene and Medical Geography, 1720–1870

This dissertation investigates how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas of hygiene and medical geography shaped the ways naval officers and physicians of the Russian Empire developed and applied a two-level framework of knowledge: on board, to govern crews and ship-spaces; outward, to imagine, compare, and manage maritime and coastal space at and beyond Russia’s territorial margins. The study spans the Imperial Russian Navy’s formative decades in the 1720s through its reforms of the 1850s–1860s. It traces the shift from the sail era’s fragmentary medical evidence to the reorganisation of naval medicine and the proliferation of professional texts, prompted by the Crimean War and the introduction of steam propulsion.

Methodologically, the project combines the social and cultural history of science with new imperial and maritime history. Primary sources include archival files of the Imperial Naval Medical Offices in the Russian State Archive of the Navy (RGAVMF), alongside printed treatises, physicians’ journals, and ministerial circulars; French and British counterparts are analysed in parallel to trace channels of knowledge transfer. Discourse analysis tracks shifts in vocabularies of pathology, spatial design, climatic labelling, professional authority, bodily and moral discipline, and imperial identity from the 1720s to the steam era.

By treating medical texts as situated knowledge, the study recasts the Imperial Russian Navy as an active node in nineteenth-century global health networks. Routines of rationing, ventilation, fumigation, and reporting did more than safeguard crews; they furnished the Russian Empire with a scientific framework for mediating intercultural encounters and sustaining imperial order at sea.