In Search of an Audience: Popular Pharmacies and the Limits of Literate Medicine in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Russia.

Clare Griffin

doi:10.1353/bhm.2015.0099

Abstract

This article addresses the question of the limits of literate medicine in Europe, through an examination of the Russian literate medical world of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Russian courtly medicine had been dominated by Western Europeans from the 1480s, but in the early eighteenth century new licensing arrangements solidified the presence of these foreigners in the wider Russian medical world. Foreign medical practitioners took advantage of this development, aiming works at an increasingly large proportion of Russian literate society. These works, along with satirical and religious works emulating or deriding medical texts, show how by the 1720s the limits of literate medicine in Russia lay not at the edges of official court medicine, but rather at the edges of literate society.

Highlights

Russian courtly medicine had been dominated by Western Europeans from the 1480s, but in the early eighteenth century new licensing arrangements solidified the presence of these foreigners in the wider Russian medical world
First and foremost, what the works surveyed above show is that their compilers believed that the limits of literate medicine in Russia lay not at the edges of the court, but at the edges of literate society
The idea that medical works had a place in literate Russian culture is supported by the so-called satirical medical books, and the religious books that copied medical genres

Summary

Introduction

The work of Blumentrost and Gurchin in creating and promoting Russian-language medical texts, problematic to pin down exactly, is hugely important in revealing aspects of literate medicine in Russia that would otherwise be lost.

Results

Conclusion