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Reviewed by:
  • Medicine within and between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 18th–19th Centuries
  • Tatjana Buklijaš
Teodora Daniela Sechel, ed. Medicine within and between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 18th–19th Centuries. The Eighteenth Century and the Habsburg Monarcy, vol 2. Bochum, Germany: Verlag Dr. Dieter Winkler, 2011. 265 pp. €39.99 (978-3-89911-144-6).

Histories of medicine on the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and their successor countries have been weakly represented in the contemporary medical and science historiography. This absence is in contrast to the interest that these two predecessors to the nationstate have received in political history, where their models of state organization have been seen to offer illuminating insights for new supranational unions. In the history of science and medicine, the ways in which science and medicine participated in the building and maintaining of empires and how they were changed in the process are topics of great current interest. While the majority of current scholarship focuses on the empires of European powers, there [End Page 127] is now new work on the Habsburg, and to a lesser extent, Ottoman Empires, such as Deborah R. Coen’s work on climatology; Allison Frank’s on geology and the oil industry; Sander Gliboff’s on Gregor Mendel and agriculture; and, on medicine, the special section that Emese Lafferton and I coedited in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences in 2007).1 The engagement with the broader imperial context also throws new light on the scientific and medical innovation in centers such as Vienna and Prague.

Medicine within and between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 18th–19th Centuries comes out of a 2008 conference and collaboration among the working group in the history of race and eugenics at Oxford Brookes, a team with strong interest in history of medicine and biological sciences in southeastern Europe, and Austrian institutions. In addition to introductory and concluding pieces, the volume contains ten essays divided in four sections: knowledge transfer, epidemics and preventive measures, medical practice, and military medicine. While some essays focus on specific parts of an empire (such as Galicia), others engage with multiple territories situated at borders of the two empires (for instance former Turkish provinces in the Balkans).

The result is a mixed bag in terms of quality of the research, analytical sharpness, and engagement with historiography. The introduction is written by a well-respected Austrian historian unfortunately not familiar with the historiography of science and medicine (see pp. 9–10). For this reason the chance to set out the historiographical themes this volume tackles and their relationship with the current literature was lost. The omission was partly remedied in the “In lieu of conclusion” essay. The first section opens with a piece on William Killigan, an Irish surgeon traveling through the Habsburg lands in the late 1820s. This fluently written essay would have been more satisfying if it engaged with the political and medical setting of Killigan’s travel and if we heard more on what made Killigan interesting and different from other contemporary medical travelers (and speaking of Irish surgeons, Oscar Wilde’s father would have been a great comparison).2 This chapter unfortunately is marred by poor editing: for example, on page 22 a “Figure One” is described in great detail, yet the essay contains no figures; in the title and running title the main character’s name is spelled as “Killingan,” etc. The second essay in the section is an examination of the influence of the Vienna School of Medicine and is little more than a list of names, dates, and institutions. [End Page 128]

The following section on contagion, with three essays examining theoretical treatises as well as the practical management of plague in the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires around 1800, is the best in terms of examining what the economic, political, and social setting within and between the two empires meant for medicine. The third section examines how medicine extended its claim over previously nonmedical issues, such as infant feeding in Galicia and pregnancy in the Ottoman Empire. The final section opens with a piece on the ways in which the introduction of conscription informed “hygienic knowledge and...

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