The 1927 Soviet Manual on Social Hygiene: The Transfer of Ideas and a New Methodology

Abstract

The article analyzes the first original Soviet (Marxist) textbook of social hygiene, “Social Hygiene: Manual for Medical Students and Doctors”, edited by A. V. Molkov and published in 1927. This textbook is compared on with the German books on social hygiene, whose translations into Russian were published in the 1920s. The examination of the evolution of Soviet social hygiene in regard to the curriculum structure and the content of textbooks in the context of the history of social health in Europe and North America leads to a conclusion that, in the early 1920s, the Soviet agenda of social hygiene was brought into line with the European agenda. The textbook edited by Molkov can be regarded as the culmination of this process of Soviet social hygiene modernization modeled after the German social hygiene: the content of Molkov’s textbook is almost fully consistent with B. Chajes’ “Kompendium der sozialen Hygiene” (1923). It had finalized the departure from the prerevolutionary tradition of “public medicine” and adoption of the agenda of society health problems and their solutions that was then widespread in Europe and America. The most significant difference between the Soviet manual and German books is scientific methods. One of the ideologists of German social hygiene, A. Grotjahn, described this discipline as a fusion of hygiene and social sciences (economics, law, political science, sociology, etc.). In the Soviet version of social hygiene, the methodology of social sciences was substituted with the dogmata of communist ideology and Soviet regulatory legal acts. However, the attempt to substitute social scientific methodology in the study of social hygiene with the Marxist approach failed and, while in the 1920s it appeared like an innovation in the spirit of the time, as years went by, the inherent contradictions between the two approaches only got deeper.