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Matthew P. Romaniello, "Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello New Books Network audience. I am your host Erica Monahan, and today I have the pleasure of interviewing historian Matthew Romanello about his new book, Europe's Climate and Health in 18th Century Russia, which has been published just last year, 2025 by Cornell University Press. And Matthew, welcome to the program. Before I get started, I want to give our listeners just a brief a few words about the work you've done so far. This book, Europe's Climate and Health in 18th Century Russia, is Matt Romanello's third monograph. His first monograph was the Elusive Empire, Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552-1671. His second monograph was Enterprising Russia and Britain in 18th Century Eurasia. And I believe I've interviewed you about that book on New Books Network as well. Our listeners can go look that up if you want to know more about this book, which is a detailed reading of diplomatic records as they reveal global 18th century commercial relations. In addition to now these three monographs, Matt has co edited with colleagues a number of important and very fine edited volumes in the field dealing with Tobacco in Russian History, the Role of Nobility in Early Modern Europe, and Sensory History, Russia in Asia the Life Cycle of Russian Things From Fish Guts to Faberge. Such a fantastic title, dealing with material Culture. And he has forthcoming a book, A Frozen State Experiencing Cold in Russian History and Culture. That too, is going to be an edited volume, co edited with Alison Smith and Trisa Trisha Starks. Excuse me. In addition to that, you've written a slew of interviews that I could. Of articles that could take up all of our time. But I, I wanted to read this out because I am so struck at the real breadth of your inquiry and publications to date. You know, you have this book about empire and how political institutions work. You've got this book about diplomacy and trade. And now in this book, we're looking at 18th century traveler and we're talking about environment and climate. So I'm just so struck by the very. The various lenses through which you've come at 18th century, 17th and 18th century history. And you have read in your various works, you will even draw on identical, you know, figures and see their works in different ways. And so I just want to spell that out for our audience a little bit so they can appreciate just the terrific opportunity to talk to someone who has so much expertise about the 18th century and setting up our discussion. Before we get right to the book, though, in typical New Books network tradition, I would like to ask you to tell us a little bit about your path into history. How did you become a historian?
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B
Well, thank you for that introduction. Um, I don't. I want to say that I ended up in history partially because I grew up at the end of the Cold War, which was definitely part of my childhood. I really ended up graduating with high school with an interest in Russia, which drove me on a slightly different path in college than I think I had intended. Um, I still. In my first semester when I was an undergraduate, I was technically an engineering major, but I still took a course in Russian literature. And then I took a course in Russian history with Patricia Herlihy, who was an amazing historian. And that sort of sold me that history was the right path for me. What I have always found a little more confusing is that I always expected I was doing modern history because I started out with this fascination in the Soviet Union. And somehow I drifted earlier as time went by. Part of that was for me, I felt there was more questions that I still had about what had gone on in the earlier periods of Russian history. There was so much in my mind that was left for us to discover and things that we needed to uncover about their past, which drove the rest, I think, of my direction as I evolved in this field.
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C
Okay, thank you. Well, speaking of questions, nice segue into why did you write this book, and how did this book come about?
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B
This book? I. I had a lot of arrogant confidence after my second book that writing books was gonna get much easier. Because that process was. I felt really straightforward. This book was nowhere close to being straightforward. I wrote the first draft, now, seven, eight years ago, and then threw it out and started over. Because I was unhappy with the way that it had come out. Specifically, I had been planning this project on tobacco. Now, really just after my first book had finished, and I was off in the archives working on tobacco, and I was reading materials to get ready. And it was actually a conversation with you and one with Nancy Coleman that made me realize maybe I actually needed to think about what I was doing with tobacco. And that became enterprising empires. I realized that I needed to sort of focus a bit more on the trade and diplomacy material to make sense of that story. Because it was hard to get tobacco specifically in a story that hadn't really been told in the way that I intended. And so I took a step back away from the material, and I was like, this is one path. There was this whole separate section of material I'd uncovered when I was starting to work on tobacco, especially. Cause I was reading travel narratives, looking at the empire and making observations. And at the same time, I was reading those sources for that project. I had started to teach history of medicine at my previous job at University of Hawaii. Because there was a demand for it among the students. And I sort of thought it was interesting. But what struck me was I was reading texts written about Russia in the 17th and 18th century that had a lot of similarities with the way information and ideas was being framed about colonial spaces in the rest of the world. There's lots of European discussions about our encounters with hot climates and what that does to our bodies. And it was interesting that you had a similar group of physicians and travelers writing about not only tropical spaces, but also cold spaces. And the coldest spaces they knew was Russia. And I was like, why has no one touched this particular batch of sources to talk about their conception of health in a different context and what that means in the other part of the world? Tobacco touched on it in a weird way. Just because part of these emerging descriptions about travel involve a lot of ethnographic descriptions about habits and customs. Everyone wanted to talk about birth practices, death rituals, religious meanings. But they also put it in a specific context about climate and space and geography and their occupations. And I just was thinking, we really need a view of Russia that explores those texts that can be in conversation with this other process that's gotten a lot more attention. And that's what this book became. I will say, over time, it's been several different things, depending on where my interests lie in the project. The earliest draft, I think, was really intended to just talk about the travel narratives and really be focused on the scientific expeditions in the 18th century. And as I was working on that over the course of a year, I just decided these narratives start to get really repetitive in their information because they're drawing on so much information from each other that they're generating. And I was like, what else can still be done with that? And so including diseases and their views of the climate became part of the project as a sort of foregrounded part of that conversation. And that forced me to sort of rethink about how the book came together as a whole project.
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C
Yeah, thanks. You know, it occurs to me we're talking in 2026, in a year which the President of the United States has announced that the United States needs Greenland, even as the same president has referred to climate change as a hoax, as these northern areas become more navigable because of global warming. So we don't often see immediate timeliness in the early modern work that's being done. But I appreciate your attention to kind of what was understood about the north, and I really welcome your insight about thinking about how colonial possessions drive scientific and interest. Scientific interest in health and climate, which you talk. Sorry, you talk about. But in England's possession of Canada, for example, et cetera. Well, speaking of other empires in the interaction, I wanted to ask you. Well, actually, first let me kind of laying the groundwork a little bit further. I want to ask you. You talk about these descriptions that you've been reading being a humoral portrait functioning as medical description is what you see as evolving into what we now would call ethnography. And so explain a little bit when you say a humoral portrait, what you mean by that.
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B
I think that is probably the biggest question that drove the whole project, and that is from not only reading these texts specifically for Russia, but also paying attention to what's happening elsewhere in the world in that era. Early modern naturalists, early modern physicians among them, were all given a similar sort of educational background in the way that they understood the environment, plants, fauna, flora, people in it, in those spaces and what it meant. And it is based fundamentally in this older conception from medicine that we call humoral medicine. That's classical in origins. It evolved over time, but it's sort of amazingly elastic as a system, as it was challenged in its principles. It just kept on expanding to refine the system, come up with greater nuance, greater detail, so that it was really flexible. Anyone who's given that 18th century education in science understand, or was at least trained in to be educated to recognize the humors in the body. If you take a very strict view, the humors are just those four substances inside your body. Blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, which have attributes linked to air, earth, water, fire. But in reality, just as important in that system was the six non naturals, the things outside the body that had an influence. And climate is among them. Someone very literal in medicine will get really angry. I call it climate because it's airs and waters, but it's the natural world outside the body that's part of it. And it also looks at the food that you eat, the amount of exercise, or what you do for physical labor. It looks at what leaves your body. They have a very great fascination in that. In classical medicine, it's also interested in the passions, which for practical purposes I just refer to as sex. And that will occasionally upset a medical historian because you can have lots of different passions. It's not only about sex, but it does normally require a full description of a patient normally encountered. How often are you having sex, or at least sexual activity as part of the issue. And they take a sort of whole body view. The humors themselves are very focused internally, but the outside is just as important. And once you get used to reading medical texts that may be about diseases or patient narratives or patient descriptions, you understand that people are feeding, not just talking about themselves and maybe their coloring or their attitudes about life, which are relevant. They're describing themselves, but it's also, where do you live, what sorts of foods do you eat, what type of labor do you do? Is part of the whole picture. There's an 18th century physician whose papers I've read extensively who worked in Edinburgh. And at one point I was just reading his case notes to pay attention to people who returned to Edinburgh from other parts of the British Empire. And regardless of what was wrong with them, he always told them what was most important was to take cold baths, eat white foods and avoid wine. White foods became phlegm, phlegm made you colder. Cold bath is to reinforce the coldness. The concern was they had gone to more warmer spaces and that threw off their internal imbalance. He's not writing in 1500 or in the year 500. He's writing at the end of the 18th century because this is still how they Understand the body people had. I think lots of scholars had loved these texts. They are the basis for ethnography. They're really rich. They have wonderful descriptions about life and the world these people live in and inhabit. But if you start to understand that they're educated in a similar sort of way that codes certain types of information as also being types of physical descriptions, you can start to connect the pieces of the way these descriptions work. And they're all coded to be this type of humoral language. So you don't need to tell me if you're talking about a group of people residing in a mountain. I can make certain conclusions about the types of bodies they have, the type of physicality they have, their looks, their hair color, their eye color. We can predict what should be the case from this body of knowledge built up over time. And that, I think was what was missing that had been unpacked, I should say, for people working in tropical spaces talking about other parts of the world. But I hadn't ever seen anyone use those texts about Russia in a similar way, even though it's a similar group of men, and it is men generating those texts about the rest of the empire. And so if you read a description of someone like the Chukti people in Siberia, often Kamchatka, they always talk about them being violent and warlike. Siberia, especially northern Siberia, should be really cold. They should have been phlegmatic, meaning they lacked ambition and passion. But in fact they were really violent. Where did that aggression come from? Well, it turns out that they ate a lot of meat. Red meat will give you too much excessive heat. It makes you angry, it makes you violent. So we always want to avoid the people that are eating meat. They're going to be angrier. And the depictions are much kinder about Siberia. Talking about people who eat fish, they come from the river, they're full of coldness. That made those people more passive and subservient. The risk, of course, for I think all of us is it is stereotyping them. And I can't ever say that they're providing accurate descriptions of what's their day to day existence. But you can understand someone reading in the 18th century who's not there is going to be looking for these sorts of clues and then basing their understanding about what these people are based on those bits hiding in the text that hadn't really been connected before.
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C
Yeah, thank you so much. I feel like there's so much of that in this book. Reading it just made me see things anew in so many ways. Like for example, if, and this may be a confession of too much naivete for a professional historian, but if sometimes, you know, I would read these accounts and just be like, wow, these people really just had a 360 degree curiosity about everything they were encountering. And they're just trying to tell me so much about this culture. You, this account that you offer is, you're saying, no, there's a formula and it's part of the, the job to create this, you humor, humoral, you know, through a humoral lens, this medical description. And so these non naturals, what they eat, how they live matter quite a bit. And it isn't, isn't just a kind of, well, if, if a real naive view would be just curiosity or maybe a less naive view, which we also bring is just a real deep cultural chauvinism. And there's that. But yeah, this really adds an insightful additional layer to make sense of so much of this material. And then as you point out that you have this example about like fish, you can be cold, but then you have this other example, unless the fish is too much sperm and this might stimulate too much of a sexual appetite in you, that like people are looking for explanations to the exceptions to their formulas.
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B
Yes. And I think that's. The exceptions, I think are why it's easy to critique this type of analysis. Because there are always people who fall outside what should work. I, however, think about it the opposite way. It's that people. Humoral theory itself is broad strokes. It really posits there's just basically four types of people in the world, or at least four attitudes, complexions, whatever they're referring it to, depending on who you're talking to. But no one group of people, really, every single person in that community conforms the same body type to the same attitudes, the same livelihood. And so they're then trying to always find the small parts that explain how people have deviated off of how they should have been. And I think that's part of the, that's why it's not a one size fits all formula. While it's trying to be exactly that. It wants to just have a broad stroke and be like, all of you are phlegmatic, you're all pale, you all have blonde hair and blue eyes, and you're fine living in a cold space. And then you'll find someone in that group that's actually violent. And then they're like, well, what did they do wrong? Where did it go? Did they spend too long in a hut in front of a Fire. Have they been smoking tobacco, putting heat inside their body? Did they sneak down? Did they go find some elk meat? And unlike everyone else in their village, has their diet gone awry? And that's always there. And it's hard with any of those sort of big ethnographic texts to sort of. There's so much information getting thrown at you at once, I think, to us to sort of cautiously go through it and sift through to figure out, okay, well, this is where this description goes wrong. One that shows up quite often for me is that cold people are not supposed to be cold. Bodies should not be able to grow facial hair for the men. And they're very upset if they find a cold community. But men have facial hair. And so then it's like, well, how is the men's diet, the man's diet, different than women in this specific place? Because their bodies are correct. The women's bodies are correct. What, they should be cold. But somehow the men are featuring this hot feature. And I think that's sort of the limitation of being educated in this sort of humoral system is that they treat those exceptions as sort of aberrations or where something's gone wrong from how things should have happened, rather than understanding that life is just a little bit more complex than the system allowed. Not everyone in a mountain. Not everyone in a mountain region when they had lowlands, automatically develops nostalgia as a disease. But you should have, if you're living in the 18th century. That's what medical wisdom told us in that era.
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C
Okay. One of the things I love about your book is how you show you pay a lot of attention to networks and the medical networks that bring Russia, that bring. Or the medical profession within Russia. We see that, and we see how it is connected to so many Europe, European networks. I love you have this inventory of, you know, how many medical professions are Russia and are in Russia and where did they get their medical degrees from? And one of the. So it's. It's just in terms of like, collecting information for people curious about that thing, that sort of thing. Fantastic book. I mean, everyone. Yeah. I'm so glad you wrote this, put this together for me, because it. And it tracks with other types of interactions in trade and diplomacy and things like that. But then here you show this really vibrant medical world in Russia with a bunch of connections to Europe. But one thing I was struck by is we see the earliest connections maybe with England, and then the Dutch come in a lot, but we don't really see France. And then I think Catherine the Great in her connections with French culture. She wrote her memoirs in French. So maybe could you talk to a little bit about that, the kind of where these networks are located, please?
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B
I think that's a great question. And it's come up when I've talked about the book before, because I think everyone's impression of Imperial Russia is that they loved France because they spoke French as their daily language. I would say in the short run, let's all separate the language from the culture. They speak French because it's easier than some of the other alternatives. Diplomats always go into Russia in the 18th century and they speak French in the court because that's what everyone speaks. So knowing French, I think was a prerequisite into the society. However, French science is something different and I think that's where the nuance was lost. I had wondered initially when I was starting this project why I wasn't seeing French physicians show up. Because especially Paris is training more physicians by the end of the 18th century than any other school. And so their absence is surprising. They felt like they should have been there. As I dove down and looked at where people actually came from, the thing that connected them is they were all trained in a curriculum that was developed from one institution. So University of Leiden's medical institution that's developed their medical curriculum at the beginning of the 18th century becomes a standard for some medical schools in Europe, and not all of them, France being the exception, they didn't adopt that curriculum. And if we look at where Russia tends to recruit its physicians from, there are always physicians trained from that Leiden based education at the beginning of the 18th century, it really is the best medical education you could receive. It differed significantly with the way that physicians had been trained because it focused on actually treating patients in real life, which was never a requirement to get a medical degree. The idea that a physician would actually see a patient is a much later notion. So they were trained practically, they were trained to intervene to provide healthcare. I think that makes them appealing. Peter the Great's interest in the Netherlands attached him to Leiden very early on. He hires several Leiden trained specialists. And I think part of it is once they start to hire a group of people, those people hire their own colleagues and alumni from the same institutions. So they create professional networks. That's a good action. Yes, I mean, in the way it works. And I think the longer that goes on, the differences that exist between the French medical curriculum and French science, French naturalists in the 18th century and the people on the other side coming out of this Dutch German school grow to the Fact that they don't get along as well, and that's the Leiden school creates this scientific legacy. That brings us to Linnaeus and a certain type of categorization and thinking about the body, thinking about flora and fauna. Everybody that's in Russia is trained in that system. Whereas the French Academy has a different conception about the way the world is functions and is organized under Buffon and they skip it. If you're actually looking in medical journals and scientific journals in the rest of Europe, there actually is a debate going on between the different schools of thought about categorization. Russia has preselected and is only on one side of the story. And so people trained in that French system didn't fit with the people working in Russia. And that reinforced, I think, the networks. If you were going to want to work with a colleague, there was a certain familiarity with working with someone that's actually from your medical school or trained in a similar way. And so it's a. It's an uneven process of recruitment. The state made some intentional choices in Russia about who they were going to hire, and they stuck with it. And I think it allows sort of French critics, of which there were many about Russia, fuel, because Russia's intentionally ignoring this French specialist, a community. Whereas there's lots of sympathy towards what Russia's doing in Germany or in Scotland, because Edinburgh is also fueling people through this pipeline.
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C
So coming to this issue of health and maybe how Russia is a part of these international networks you talk about in the book, tell us, maybe give the listeners a sense. How does the how to see observations made in Russia contribute to the understanding of the disease? Scurvy.
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B
Scurvy is Russia's most famous disease in the 18th century. But so there is this medical community very tied in with their established institutions at home. Russia has its own Academy of Sciences. By 1730, like all the other academy of sciences is sharing their publications with one another. I was sort of fascinated, this may have just been me, that they were all hand delivered. Quite frequently there's some expectation that one academy needs to literally hand it off to guarantee its delivery to the next one. But they are definitely circulating information at that level. Medical journals. Every medical school had its own journal it published where its own alumni reported on their cases, their information, their knowledge, and that got shared in those networks. So people in Russia trained at a particular school are writing back to that school with all of their information. The expectation for most people in the rest of Europe is that Russia, the empire itself, must have had a great understanding about diseases that are called by cold environments. And the most famous cold disease of the 18th century to me is still scurvy. What I think was a surprise to me many years ago when I started this is going into the 18th century, there's a discussion going on in the medical community that there's two types of scurvy. There's sea scurvy, the one that you get when you're on board for too long. And then there's land scurvy, which was associated with cold environments, particularly Russia and Scandinavia, since they were conceived of as different diseases, they had different sets of causes, they had different treatments that were recommended, even though they ended up with similar sorts of symptoms. As Britain in particular, got very focused on trying to manage scurvy so that the navy had greater access and mobility in the 18th century, the physician for the medical board in Britain, James Lind, who writes his very eventually famous study, the Treatise of Scurvy, that transforms the way that scurvy's handled inside the British Navy. He corresponds with his colleagues in Russia for their cases of lan scurvy. And those Russian cases, those case notes from Astrahan and from St. Petersburg and from Riga actually become the justification for Lyn to make the case that land scurvy and seaskurvi are in fact the same disease, just one disease, then they could develop a common set of treatments. So he really appreciated the fact that Russia, the physicians working in Russia had specialist knowledge of important diseases. And he tapped into that network to extract that information and then share it with people. And so knowledge about treating people in the barracks in Astrahan is getting shared with the British navy so that they have greater success in the Pacific. And that process, I think, is really interesting because it's. We so often, I think, when you come into this field of doing Russian history, Russia is so isolated and ostracized by the outside world. But it turns out when you start to actually look at what's being the conversations that are happening, it's information's floating around. What I did notice the first time I went to a medical conference and I was talking about scurvy and the Russian cases, there was some specialists on British medical history who were very confused that I was trying to argue that Russia had value to James Lind. And they were like, where's the correspondence? And I was like, I don't have the specific letters, but he lists the person by name and he's talking about, this is Riga. That means Riga in the Russian Empire. And this is Astrahan from the Russian Empire. And so it had always been there. But even the way that people had used these texts before who weren't thinking about Russia, hadn't really processed about how Lind had been gathering his information and putting it together. They were more concerned about the output from that investigation, not the process by which he pulled information together.
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C
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that. Reading this book. Oh, excuse my voice. Reading this book, you're starting to get like. I was reminded once of listening to a conference of historians of Asia and historians of science, talking about the cultivation and networks of that light, that knowledge. And one distinguished historian made this remark of how. Oh, and this. This little glossary of Chinese words was written in St. Petersburg, of all places, as if that was a completely unexpected outlier that like. And it had been said with no regard that Russia was the first European country to have a treaty with China, and that the Academy of Sciences, as you know, Greg Afenigan of Spokespies and Scholars, lays out, so clearly there was a good deal of context, but that it was quite typical to just consider Russia as this quite isolated outlier. And so, kind of along that lines, I'd like you to tell us a little bit about the history of smallpox. So you lay out this wonderful case study of Catherine ii, really initiating a program of. Or would you tell us about it? You know, vaccination, but variolation. So maybe could you tell us a little bit about that program? And also, how does what Catherine's doing in Russia compare to what's going on in other, you know, Western European other places?
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B
Thank you. I think that's a very good question. And it's one of those things. One of the issues going into this book was Catherine's variolation program for smallpox. It actually is, I think, one of her better known accomplishments in terms of bringing what was a new medical treatment into the empire and promoting it at large. One of the things that fascinates so, and this is. Seems to be everything I've ever read, everything that exists tells us this is Catherine's personal choice. Relatively early on in Europe, when the process of variolating to prevent smallpox infection is still controversial, Catherine decides to hire a specialist from England and brings him out to Russia to inoculate herself and her son early on in her reign. And that is a very surprising turn of events. It happens actually, at the same time when France bans variolation as a practice. Just to give you a sense of the contrast, there are variolation clinics set up in Britain in that time, but it's relatively new. The science itself is not new. It existed in the Middle east and in Asia for quite a long time. Um, but Catherine knew enough that she specifically wanted a specialist in the latest technique for variolating, which was? She wanted a specialist trained in the Suetonian method. Sutton, as an English physician, rather than the traditional variolation method that was brought over from the Ottomans, required putting a cut. And then you put a live pox, a still from a her currently infected person, into the cut, seal it up, wait for the infection to happen. The principle is, if they had a mild case, then the person would hopefully only get a mild case of smallpox, where there was a relatively greatly diminished chance of death and the scarring would not be as severe. There's some problems with that, which is why I'm sort of stumbling through this. It works and it doesn't. In the modern day, we know that there's two strains. There's variola major and variola minor. Major has about a third of the people that get it can die. Minor is significantly smaller. They don't know that in the 18th century. What has to happen is a physician needs to observe the severity of the symptoms and decide whether you have a good case or a bad case, which is why there's some. The practice that's developed is you keep the pox alive by inoculating pairs of children. In case one dies, there's always a spare, so you can keep using them to keep the process going. In Britain, the practice is to buy orphanages and attach it to an orphanage and then use the orphans for inoculating or for developing the pox. In the middle of the 18th century, one British physician, Sutton, says, instead of actually cutting, we're just gonna use a puncture with some of the pus, so that's not as severe. And then he develops a hole regime to support the person. He wanted to get involved and alter the diet, alter the conditions in the room. There was aftercare for a while to make sure that the results were very successful. He did not want to variolate or inoculate small children. He thought it was too risky. And his results are excellent. It gets studied in Britain. Officially. The royal physician says, oh, all of this expensive treatment, this very fancy diet and this multiple drug regime is not necessary. Let's just cut it down to doing this in a cold room and you'll be fine. And the physician in Britain who publishes this as his breakthrough is who Catherine hires. I do. And I still convinced that Katherine hires him because he's Already publishing. Sutton doesn't publish in his lifetime. Dimmesdale does. I think that's why he's appealing to Catherine, because she's going to hire someone who's going to publicize what a great thing she's done. He gets brought to Russia. They set him up. They set up a house for him to run a clinic. He stays in the palace because he's not going to treat patients. He brings out his son, who's a medical student who hasn't finished, to run the clinic. His son supervises actual physicians in Russia who had been varating patients. But they're not important to the story, according to Catherine. She just dismisses their knowledge and they run it. They give them subjects to experiment on. They only take cadets and maids, people who don't have the ability to object. They treat them. The first round is successful. Then they start a second round. And that round is a disaster because no one breaks out in an infection. Dimmesdale wants to authorize his son to do a third round to make sure it's working. Catherine says, no, go ahead. I'm ready. They take a child out of the clinic, smuggle them across the city blindfolded, so she didn't know where she was going to treat Catherine. Catherine successfully treated the child's return to her parents. They were very insistent that the child's parents could not be notified what happened, because then they would think that they had some right to ask Catherine for a favor, and that could not be the outcome. But there were people in the court in that initial trip who were inspired by Catherine's example and also were very elated. Ten years after the initial treatment, Catherine invites Dimmesdale back, has her grandsons treated. At that point, there is a smallpox clinic up and running. And shortly thereafter, in the early 1780s, they authorized the idea they were going to expand a variolation across the empire. Within about a decade of this process happening, we know that there are smallpox clinics in St. Petersburg, in Moscow, in Kyiv, in Kazan, and then there's one out in Siberia. They set it up, and hopefully I'm correcting myself in Irkutsk. And that's where it starts. And they were open to the public. People could come in. They could be very related. Dimmesdale writes a sort of manifesto where he thinks that Catherine should send out the army to round up people and force them to be subjected to the treatment. She opts not to do that. Um, but it is available. And in terms of the number of clinics Russia has in the 1780s, they're on par or better than the other states of Europe. This is one of the first state authorized large, large scale inoculation campaigns in Europe. The reason why I sort of had to put large scale in quotes, which is hard to do on a podcast, is because Russia's enormous and five clinics in Russia is not covering that much ground bus but they're making the effort and trying. Doing that before France does I think is noteworthy, especially the way that we think about France's accomplishment in the 18th century. But Russia doesn't have quite the follow through in the 19th century that other places do. Both the British and Spanish empires are spreading it through the empire by the beginning decades of the 19th century. And we don't really see that happening in Russia. But the fact that Catherine's doing it early I think is still relatively noteworthy as an accomplishment. And I think there's. You can take a step back and say from a public health perspective, this is one of the first big successes you can document in the 18th century that here's a government stepping in to do this procedure which they know will save lives. On the other hand, there's just the actual mechanism of it is still where I had my biggest shocks. The kidnapping children, keeping them blindfolded and experimenting on them without telling them what the procedure was I found shocking. But no one talking about it in the 18th century does because that is medical treatment in the 18th century. What strikes me more as I've had some distance from it is the only goal is protecting the nobility and they're willing to sacrifice any number of peasants to make that happen. And it does give you is this a great success for public health? If it's really only designed to profit a very small group of elites at the top, I don't think so. But at the same time they're still doing more than France does. So it's kind of progress for Russia and also it's not that much progress for Russia.
- [41:28]
D
Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking Eblis achieved itch relief in clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [41:48]
E
MGLIS Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg per 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have New Orleans worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglis. Before starting ebglis. Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.
- [42:21]
D
Ask your doctor about eglis and visit eglis.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
- [42:29]
C
Yeah, thank you. It's such a fascinating case study. I mean, certainly not the path there isn't adhering to 21st century standards of patient care, but at the same time raising this question. You know, fortunately by the 21st century, developed countries like the United States of America had all this stuff worked out about the relationship between the state and public health. Huh. Yes, but yeah, so that, that is a fascinating example. And this book is so rich that one of these strands that you talk about that you mention is, you know, Catherine chooses Dimmesdale because he's publishing and there's a PR element to this. And you even write about the Academy of Sciences founded by one of Peter the first final decrees in 1725 or 4. Right. But that from the outset there is a PR component and an image managing component to everything that happens and comes out of the Academy of Sciences. And I thought maybe I wanted to ask you about this one example of this French. Your book is making me think more about, you know, connections kind of even pre. Yeah. With France. But ABB chapter Ataroche is this Frenchman who writes this account and maybe you can tell us more about it. But I am, you know, just also thinking that he's writing in absolutist France about, you know, a critique in some ways of absolutist Russia is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. So it's not all about political system and that Russian backwardness has been there. But anyway, like, please tell us about, you know, his account and, and how Catherine deals with that.
- [44:27]
B
Yes, I agree with you. The propaganda part is. Is built into the discussion and it's partially because I was interested in the networks in which knowledge was exchanged. And there are, I think, maybe unsurprising to us now in a more cynical age, intentional choices being made about what type of information circulates. And I guess getting to talk about Shap Dataroch, I was surprised to discover more than one instance of Catherine suing for libel in foreign countries because she's very carefully manipulating or controlling her image abroad. And so Ashab Datroch is a naturalist. He wanted to travel into Siberia, which was going to have the best visibility, to watch the transit of Venus, which seems to get Russia into trouble in more than one century. And so he gets permission to enter Russia. He travels out into Siberia, he makes it to Tobolsk, um, not all the way across, really, just part way, and then leaves. It's about a year long trip into the Russian, you know, into Siberia and back. And that's in 1763, I think. And then a couple years later, his account of traveling through Russia about during the transit of Venus and his observations were published. It's a scandalous attack on Russia from Catherine and I think the Russian Academy's perspective, because he's observing, he has a lot of just concerns about the way that Russia mismanages its empire. He thinks that it's mistreating its imperial subjects. He does, as struck me, accuse them of leading to the extermination of all life in Siberia, from the introduction of syphilis disease and smallpox, which he blames them for bringing into Siberia. And so Catherine can't help but take it personally, I guess. I want to say there is a point by point refutation published in French that comes out a couple. Well, maybe later that year, even after his account, there is a literature, a debate among my literary colleagues about whether Catherine penned it herself anonymously or had it written. I don't focus on that response in particular, because what I was more interested in is how Shap Datarosh arrives at his information, because he's actually citing the second Kamchatka expedition and all of its Russian official records as proof that Siberia is mismanaged. So he's looking back to some of Russia's most famous naturalists from the 1730s and pointing out that these are all the people that observed the damage that was being done to the Russian empire. And he's really taking their observations and removing their optimism about the fact that their expectation as officials of the Russian empire is that, yes, society could be more developed and the population could be larger in Siberia, and this is the information we need to make those steps to improvement. And Shapdataroch's approach is to eliminate all the improvement suggestions and just observe the reality which is not great for people in Siberia who are. The population's low, they're living in a subsistence economy in a very harsh environment. That's what he focuses on. He's not a. He's both not alone. I think those impressions of Russia are out there quite often. And I mean, in fact, he's reading official accounts from Russia, but he doesn't have any expectation that Russia can fix it. I think, like a lot of French specialists in the 18th century, he's mostly angry with France using Russia as a scapegoat to complain about this style of government and the problems it creates and managing empires in a way that could be published legally in France, because it's not discussing their empire, it's discussing how badly someone else's empire is being managed. But it does. The response from the Russian government in the wake of that I think, is really deliberate. Catherine actually relies quite heavily on Voltaire, who she's in correspondence with, to condemn him. Catherine tries to get the information out to the public that he's a very unreliable source because he actually wasn't in Russia long enough to observe everything. She wants to draw attention away from the fact that he's using sources that her government did produce to create that narrative. But it is, you can see he's an example of how the information that Russia's producing and is circulating that it's choosing to let into the public reading world can be used against them. I think it's fair to say that no empire in the 18th century is managing its people very well. So it's sort of interesting that Russia is subjected to that particular attack at that moment. As I point out in the book, by time his account's actually published, Catherine's already authorized the smallpox variolation process, I suspect, but I can't prove that. In fact, the reason why she wants a very prominent public health moment against smallpox is because she's been accused of letting everyone in Siberia die from smallpox. Here she's taking positive steps. They could have talked about, but it's a sign about sort of the ways in which information moves around and how it can be manipulated in other ways. Russia likes to get its information into the hands of people that they think are going to be sympathetic with it. And so sharing it with the medical schools that Russian professionals have come from is getting into a friendly audience. Here's what happens when it ends up in the hands of an unfriendly audience.
- [50:15]
C
Well, thank you. And you have other great case studies about plague and about Qatar. I won't. I'll encourage our readers to, you know, read about those themselves. But I. I wanted to go back in time a little bit to this second Kamchatka decade, to the second Kamchatka expedition. And you. You have this. You talk about Stellar and sex and his kind of observations about sex and. Okay. And even this moment where he talks about. I did this experiment on a. On a woman. I had this woman at my table to ex. To find out what diet. What effect diet has on sex. Tell us more about this example, please. And by this German who's on the expedition.
- [51:10]
B
I think Stone is an interesting figure. So the second Kamchatka expedition is this massive undertaking sponsored by the state to go off and investigate Siberia and then into the North Pacific. It involves really hundreds of staff. There's multiple specialists, there's historians alongside the botanists and the mineral specialists and the metallurgical specialists, and they're all gathering information and seeing what's available. Steller is the second official botanist. He replaces the original botanist who heads back to cash in on the fame from having crossed Siberia. So Stellar gets, you know, he gets sent off. He goes to Kamchatka. He lives in Kamchatka for a year before the expedition goes across the North Pacific. The voyage across the North Pacific is when Vitus Baring dies on the way back. Those accounts are interesting to read because everyone hates Stellar. I think he must have been difficult to live with. He's constantly telling everyone that they're wrong about what they're choosing to do and how they live their lives. But we're really fortunate in the sense that he documented an amazing amount. And despite the difficulties of getting into Russia at the moment, for academics at least, I don't. I can't say a majority of his writings are available to us now, but certainly we know more about his feelings about the expedition and observations in his diaries than we do with some of the other figures in this modern day. And his diary from Kimchatka has a lengthy section about how does one adapt to living in Kamchatka? What are the things you have to do there? Kamchatka is a very weird space in the early 18th century, especially the Russian expeditions. Everyone going into the North Pacific from Russia thinks of Kamchatka as an island, because the only way they would get there is they would get on a boat from Odkhorsk and then travel out to Kamchatka, and then they had what they think of as sort of an island. Life, they're isolated, it's difficult. They're dependent on the local communities to survive. Stellar's very clear that the only way that he could possibly survive is he had to have a woman running his household for him because there was no way he could do that. And then observing behaviors among the indigenous people in Kamchatka, he decides they're too sexually active, which occupies a weird space for these humoralist thinkers. Kamchatka is cold in the North Pacific, but it also has volcanoes. Different types of environments generate people that have. We might think of it as a mixed biology. Their bodies don't conform to the way they should. Generally cold bodied peoples, people living in cold spaces should have not been interested in sex. But Steller observes everyone and thinks that everyone in Kamchatka is having sex all the time. So he decides he's going to solve the sex problem in Kamchatka by controlling this woman's life and in particular her diet to kill all sexual impulses inside her body. And he's very confident that after a year of experimenting on her, he succeeds. You have to go into the story knowing that we have no idea who this woman is. We have nothing from her perspective. We don't really have anyone else on the expedition writing about Stella's relationship with this woman or even with the local community that he's living among. So we really are dependent on just his view. And so I do think we need to take it with a grain of salt. I tend to read any of the expedition authors when they write about sexuality or women's bodies. I don't think it's necessarily because the people they're observing are living the way that they're critiquing them for having too much sex. In Stellar's case, I think we know what Stellar thinks about other people. Stellar was very sexually fascinated by people on Kamchatka. He writes constantly about how everything they do leads to sex, which I think tells us a lot about what Stellar wished happened and not so much about what may have been actually happening. So I think, I think he's a really difficult figure in the modern day to deal with. And when I read that diary and read him writing about trying to, you know, take over this woman's life and control her diet to stop her from having sex, I was like, do I need to rethink everything he ever wrote? Because there's apparently more going on here than I had processed. I think if you take, you know, the way that he treats this woman and living in this village with Also the fact that everyone that we know on the voyage who writes about him has very critical things to say about him. I think that this is a man who's very difficult in multiple fronts, in multiple ways. And I do think that forces us a little bit to rethink his criticism of everyone else and the way that he relates to them.
- [55:56]
C
Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, that.
- [55:59]
B
Yeah.
- [55:59]
C
That this woman who has to live with Stellar for a year loses her sexual appetite and. But he's sure it's about the diet, given the greater context of what people say about him.
- [56:09]
B
Yes. That she has to stop eating fish roe that's been fermented, which she thinks is the culprit. And I still can't figure that one out. In all the pieces I. They do. There is generally a concern that foods that get acidic have too much heat that would make you sexually active. So I think that is where that's coming from. But to have picked up on that particular issue, I think, again, says something about Stellar and not necessarily other people, if you go in. And I think this has been done much better in other people who've studied other empires, writing out people going tropical climates. I think there we expect that European travelers have a very sexualized view and expectations about communities in the tropics. I think still there's sort of a moment when you realize that's also going on in Russia. The way they're talking about it may not be quite in the same terms, but it's definitely there. And one of his other colleagues, I think in the second Himchatka, complains that after he gave small gifts to the women, they still wouldn't invite him into their huts, which he thought was very rude. And he writes about it because he really wants to see the inside of the huts and the way they're decorated. But I don't know if that's where his interest ends, because if he was writing that and he was in Tahiti, we'd automatically assume that's coded sexual exploitation happening, which I assume it probably is in Russia. But he doesn't actually. Of course, he's not gonna say that because they don't write about the world that way. And I. It's part of the. Part of that I think is generally the challenge for me in thinking about this. Most of the travelers and the observations about empires that we see in tropical spaces is people from within that empire, from the motherland, writing about the way that we're managing their empires or the concern about running their own colonial possessions. In Russia, we really are encountering a group of people who are from other spaces writing about how Russia's managing its empire. Early on in the book, I used to always get questions like, how do you think you're writing about Russian medicine if everyone in the book is German and British? Which on one hand is a fair question, but on the other hand, where were you in Europe that you could guarantee that you had the same ethnicity, nationality as your physician? That's not the 18th century world. I was always comfortable saying, these people belong to Russia. If you go and work for Russia for 30 years, I'm okay calling during that. You have a Russian career. We can treat you as an authority in Russian space if you're working for the state. But I do think when we look and explore the ways they talk about the empire, there's some challenges to sort of thinking through and treating their observations cautiously. I do think a lot of the Germans are writing back home in hopes of getting a university appointment so they can move on. We know that's happening with the Mellon family. And then you have to wonder, like, are they altering the text to make sure it's an appropriate story so that it gets better reception when it's read in German or in French or in English? And there's no easy answer for that. I think that's part of the process I find fascinating. My best solution was really just to read as many accounts as possible to try to find what's common across them and not necessarily find any one author reliable. And I think Steller is a really good case study about why we might have problems with the reliability of one of these observers.
- [59:30]
C
Yeah, thank you so much. I want to just encourage all our listeners to really read this book. There is so much in it, and you do bring so much expertise of. I mean, you're not kidding when you say just read. I'm amazed at kind of the cast of characters that you can contextualize and bring through this book. It's really a wonderful reading. And I want to ask you kind of a broad question. Right. So thinking about all these accounts and whether a humoral description, a medical description, or ethnography, a lot of it, we do see people saying things like, oh, these have big bodies, they have little vivacity and kind of bracketing and being completely agnostic on issues of a national character or anything like that, I. One thing that kind of pops into my mind is that when. So when I took my first History of Russian Culture class with Liv Lusev, who was a Russian dissident, one of the ways he explained to us, Russian character was. He said, you have a peasant, primarily peasant culture in a place where the winters are long and long and cold and the summers are short with very long days. You know, up there in northern latitudes, you have an extraordinary amount of daylight. And he said, and this led to a culture where people worked very hard, very long days all throughout the summer to put away their food, put up their food. And then, if you. If you got that right, the winter was really a time to relax and do home crafts and home projects and things like that inside your hut. And he said, and this contributed to a personality that was quite maximalist. And this resonates quite a bit if we look at, you know, the early. Like if, you know, if in the United States, Russian history writing really emerges as a, you know, Cold War project, you know, roughly put. And one of the main questions is, you know, how did they have a revolution? You have these early seminal writers talking about the maximalist personality that drew Russians to a revolutionary pathway. But it just occurs to me in, unless I missed it, and in my own reading, in none of the foreign accounts that do make attempts to describe and generalize about the Russian character to do, I encounter that sort of explanation. And so I was just. I just wanted to hear kind of your thoughts on that or. And have I missed it?
- [62:19]
B
No. I can say a couple things. One, I do think over the course and in the edited volume that's coming out of frozen state, one of the things that's easier to trace when you get into the modern era and fortunately benefiting from many other scholars, is that over the course of the 19th century, I think there is a transformation of Russian attitudes about the cold and winter, about what role it functions in society. I think the pessimism that exists about the environment and the climate in the 18th century gets refashioned in the 18th century as they're finding ways to explain their lived environment as being more positive. And I think by the time you get to the revolutionary era, I think you're getting a more optimistic assessment about Russia's climate and what it means for the people than you get in the earlier period. In my period in the 18th century, the question that I think underlies every naturalist account is trying to explain what they thought was a fundamental problem. Russian people, being in a cold environment should not have had an empire that belonged to temperate people. They have the rationality and energy to manage an empire, and Russia should. The Russians should not have. That is, the first draft was called Enigmatic Empire because there was this Fundamental question about why is Russia an empire? And they sort of, if you read it just for that question, you come up with various answers. The most common one, I think in the 18th century is that Russian bodies got unnaturally hardened by their practice, by their life. And particularly they point to Russia's love of the banya and the exposure to extreme heat as being really important for overcoming the cold and how that would lead them to be indolent and lazy. They were getting this burst of heat coming in all the time and their pores would open and all the bad humors in their body came out. And the banya practice itself of getting yourself to expose to heat and then plunging yourself into cold, whether it's water or running out into the snow, is the way that their bodies became hardened and resisted the environment. And so Russian bodies and Russian people were more than their environment. They don't worry about the seasonality of it. They just had a social practice that allowed them to develop a body that was not what the environment should have produced. That shows up quite often, especially in the first half of the 18th century. You see that account being written in. There are some problems when the studies get bigger about the empire because there are other people living inside the Russian empire for whom the steam bath is a common practice. And then you run into problems. Why didn't the Finns take over the Russian Empire if they also had a steam bath? And they don't have a good answer for that. And I think that's why sort of that interest in sort of the body getting hardened drops away. But the seasonality isn't as big an issue. I've done other work. People who write before the middle of the 17th century about Russia talk about Russia as a land of extremes. And it has extreme heat and extreme cold. And they thought the Russian national character was based somewhere on both of those extreme. Like what was important was it was an extreme environment that was producing these people that gave them. And maybe something like that maximalist idea. But I advocate there. And is that really the disaster that is the middle of the 17th century shifts for an extended period of time the perception that Russia doesn't have extreme heat, it's just cold. And you have that bad as we know, global decade in the 1640s, which is the coldest decade in that era. It's abysmal with the volcanic eruptions, lack of solar radiation are all climbing there. The plague that the lack of food supply, the plague that follows. Post 1650, Russia only gets talked about in at least by foreigners as just being cold. And they start to experiment with this hardening argument to try to talk about what the capacity is. And then, you know, if you read the 18th century texts, the heat in the summer is missing. They don't talk about it. It sort of falls out of their interest. The only time they talk about hot climates, or at least the hot experience, is if they're in the southern parts of the empire. There definitely is a belief that the northern spaces are cold with cold peoples. But if you go south into the Caucasus, along the Black Sea, into Central Asia, then you're going to encounter people that have hot bodies and they have more energy. That's why all the Bukharins end up as merchants, because they came out of a hot environment and were very active. But Russian, Russian people in the 18th century really do remain this enigma. Like everything the Europeans understood about science and the way bodies worked told us that they should not have run an empire. And yet here they are occupying this enormous space.
- [67:08]
C
And certainly in the, you know, 16th century and much of the 17th century, they don't have much in the way of southern territory. But. Okay, it has been a real pleasure talking to you, and I know that your time is short, so we will wrap up. But before we go, we mentioned that you have this forthcoming book, A Frozen State Experiencing Cold in Russian History and Culture. And I really look forward to getting my hands on that. But before I let you go, I want to ask you, what are you working on now?
- [67:38]
B
Oh, that's a good question. I've been trying to finish off some articles that have come along. I just had an article on cholera get accepted for publication last week, which was originally gonna be the end of this book before it had to get shorter to make the publisher happy. So that got published separately. I'm starting some work, particularly about thinking about children's health and the diseases they encountered which came from this project. And it'll be a little bit more broad. I did notice one of the things that happened writing Europe's laboratory is that I did fall into the trap. I think that everyone does who's a historian. We like the diseases that have big death tolls, high mortality rates. They get a lot more publicity. They get a lot more interest from physicians. I get a lot more written about them. It's the sort of ordinary illnesses that people get and recover from that I think we need to tap into as they've started to look into them. I think they actually contribute to our knowledge about what's going on with disease theory and the way they understand the body works. And so I'm sort of transitioning to think about that in the future.
- [68:46]
C
Well, thank you. All right. Well, to our listeners, thank you for staying with us. The book is Europe's Laboratory Climate and health in 18th century Russia. And Matt Romanello, thank you so much for talking with me about it today.
- [69:01]
B
Thank you. It was a wonderful.