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Department of History and Philosophy of Science

 

sarajevoOne-day conference, organised by Tatjana Buklijas and Emese Lafferton, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, held at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science on 23 June 2006.

Historians examining the interaction between Western science and imperialism have shown how Western powers employed science and medicine to reinforce their rule and propagate their culture in the countries they colonized. They have, furthermore, highlighted how the colonial economic and social organization affected the health of populations and how, simultaneously, Western medicine itself was profoundly reshaped by encounters with new cultures, diseases and medical practices. These studies have opened important questions that underpin the current debates about science and medicine in the post-colonial and post-Cold war world. Yet they are exclusively based on Western powers with non-European colonies, in particular Britain, and consequently fail to offer explanatory frameworks for the role of science and medicine in the expansion and maintenance of two geographically contiguous empires of Central and Eastern Europe: the Habsburg Empire and Russia. Little historical attention has been given to the ways in which the particular forms of governmentality as well as the multiethnic and multicultural environments of these empires shaped medical and scientific knowledge and practices.

This workshop aims to open new perspectives on the relationship between medicine, science and imperialism by studying it in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian context in the long nineteenth century. The papers, ranging in topics from Russian astronomy to Austrian military psychiatry, will study how science and medicine were deployed in nation-building strategies and 'internal colonization' of geographic regions and ethnicities, while, at the same time, they were appropriated for political goals by non-dominant social and ethnic groups, e.g. new national movements. The workshop will furthermore examine the importance of language as a tool of cultural domination within, and beyond, science and medicine. More generally, its aim is to contribute to history of science, medicine and imperialism, as well as to the social and cultural history of these regions.

Programme

Each paper will last for 30 minutes and will be followed by a 15-minute discussion period.

9.00 Registration
9.30 Opening words
  Session I
9.45 Michael Gordin (Princeton University), 'Let Them Read German: The Zeitschrift für Chemie and the Creation of Russian Chemistry'
10.30 Tatjana Buklijas (University of Cambridge), 'A Surgically Divided Empire: Medicine and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna'
11.15 Coffee break
  Session II
11.30 Leslie Topp (Birkbeck College, University of London), 'Habsburg Psychiatric Institutions: Medicine, Government and Architecture in International and Regional Contexts'
12.15 Hans-Georg Hofer (University of Freiburg), 'Psychiatry in a Shattered Society: War and the Politics of Mental Trauma in Austria-Hungary (1914–1920)'
13.00 Lunch
  Session III
14.00 Simon Werrett (University of Washington), 'The Astronomers' El Dorado: Pulkovo Observatory and the Theatre of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Russia'
14.45 Daniel Beer (Royal Holloway College, University of London), 'Physical Anthropology and Race Theory in Late Imperial Russia'
15.30 Emese Lafferton (University of Cambridge), 'The Hungarian Kingdom as "Europe in Miniature": Strategies of Nation-building in the Medical and Social Sciences around 1900'
16.15 Coffee
16.45 Discussion
17.45 Closing words
19.00 Dinner

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