Birth of the Russian Patient: Somatic Modes of Attention and the Embodied Self in a Mid-Eighteenth-Century Russian Diary

Abstract

Summary Research into the history of doctor–patient relations or into the sick person’s perspective on treatment and prophylaxis never ceases to enrich or even undermine existing theoretical approaches to the experience of illness. Ego-documents created by ‘sick-men’ in early modern Europe demonstrate complex patient behaviour that resembled neither the active ‘patient–consumer’ of the post-war period nor the ideal type of the passive ‘patient–sufferer’ of the nineteenth century. This article contributes to the scholarly discussion on illness experience, the history of the body and subjectivity by analysing unique eighteenth-century sources from the Russian archives. A comparative analysis of the self-account of a sick-person during the early period of the dissemination of learned medicine in imperial Russia reveals both expertise and personal reflection, and the role both ego-documents and printed calendars play in shaping self-observation skills.