Arzte zwischen Deutschland und Russland: Lebensbilder zur Geschichte der medizinischen Wechselbeziehungen (review)

This book is bound to stimulate the curiosity of scholars interested in medical migration. Especially now that the archives of the former Soviet Union have become more accessible to scholars from abroad, we are bound to be intrigued by any new publication on the connections between German and Russian medical men since the reign of Peter I (1689–1725). Moreover, Müller-Dietz is no novice in the field: his interest in the subject dates back to long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, as is demonstrated by his extensive bibliography on the subject. For the present volume, he has drawn on this lifelong interest in German-Russian relations. However, the result has turned out to be predominantly a reshuffling of previously published materials—a combination that offers useful insights at times, but also causes some disappointment.

Müller-Dietz has chosen to arrange his materials in “biographical profiles,” in order to lead the reader into the intricacies of the multifarious endeavors of several generations of German medical men and scholars in Russian service. The sketches of two dozen selected careers are for the most part chronologically arranged, divided among three chapters that cover the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century until the prerevolutionary years, and the first half of the twentieth century. Each biographical sketch highlights particular German influences in the build-up of Russian medical organizations and institutions. Together, they form a picture of the many capacities in which Germans functioned in the construction of Russia’s medical landscape: as court physicians, as influential agents in the foundation of the Academy of Science, as participants in eighteenth-century geographical expeditions “drawing the map of Russia,” and as medical educators or key actors in shaping new disciplines such as hygiene or medical statistics.

Each chapter opens with a few pages of general information. The author’s choice to focus on interesting individuals such as the Blumentrost family, Peter S. Pallas, Johann Peter Frank, Heinrich Heine’s brother Maximilian, and Emil Roesle should have made the material easily accessible for an uninitiated reader—but this, unfortunately, is not always the case. The overall undertaking is perhaps too vast, and Müller-Dietz takes a lot for granted. A worked-out interpretive framework is lacking. It is not until the closing passages of the book that we are offered a glimpse of the author’s motivation for engaging in this study: on page 173, he expresses his belief that the internationalism of medical science would and should safeguard the unity of mankind. This broad ideological stance might account for the fact that he has not availed himself of the more recent, rapidly expanding bibliography on scientific transmission and translation, which offers a wide array of critical interpretations of premodern and modern scientific interactions between countries.

In part as a consequence, too little political, economic, or social background is given to make sufficient sense of many of the details that are being offered. For instance, although much is said about what attracted Germans about moving to Russia, or what motivated Russians to recruit German craftsmen and scholars, any further interpretation is left to the reader. The author does not assist those not already grounded in Russian social and political history in their assessment of the specific difficulties that the Russian system faced in various epochs in establishing medical institutions or introducing changes in health-care provisions. He makes it hard to evaluate to what extent the various Russian reform plans were modeled upon foreign (German) examples, and for what reasons. The reader will have to resort to other studies (of which there are fortunately an increasing number) to put the pieces together.

This lack of contextualization and critical interpretation is all the more regrettable, since many passages in the book hint at Müller-Dietz’s vast...