***Apologies for cross-posting***

*Science and medicine in the multinational empires of Central and Eastern
Europe*

One-day workshop organized by Tatjana Buklijas and Emese Lafferton, will
take place at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science,
University of Cambridge, on 23 June 2006.

PURPOSE

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

Daniel Beer (Royal Holloway College, University of London), 'Physical
Anthropology and Race Theory in Late Imperial Russia'

Tatjana Buklijas (University of Cambridge), 'A surgically divided empire:
medicine and national identity in late C19 Vienna'

Michael Gordin (Princeton University), 'Let Them Read German: The
Zeitschrift für Chemie and the Creation of Russian Chemistry'

Hans-Georg Hofer (University of Freiburg), 'Psychiatry in a Shattered
Society: War and the Politics of Mental Trauma in Austria-Hungary
(1914-1920)'

Emese Lafferton (University of Cambridge), "The Hungarian Kingdom as 
'Europe in Miniature': Strategies of Nation-building in the Medical and 
Social Sciences around 1900"

Leslie Topp (Birkbeck College, University of London), 'Habsburg Psychiatric
Institutions: Medicine, Government and Architecture in International and
Regional Contexts'

Simon Werrett (University of Washington), 'The Astronomers' El Dorado:
Pulkovo Observatory and the Theatre of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Russia'


For more information, including a booking form, visit
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/medicine/empires.html.






-- 
Dr. Emese Lafferton
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, United Kingdom
Tel.: 00-44-(0)1223-331-104