Abstract
In 1913 the organizers of the International Medical Congress in London prohibited Polish physicians for the first time from bringing their own delegation based on the principle that nations without a state were not allowed to have official representation. Bolesław Wicherkiewicz, president of the Polish Medical Committee of the three partitions for the congress, sent a letter to British newspapers urging board members to leave aside political matters and concentrate on the fight against diseases.1 Given the long-standing contribution of Polish physicians to medicine, Wicherkiewicz believed that Poles had the right to participate as Poles and join the assembly of other civilized nations. The Polish appeal for representation at the international congress shows how scientific knowledge and scientific endeavors were not immune to their political context or to the process of making of modern nation-states. It also demonstrates how important it was for Poles to maintain a distinct national identity in the scientific community, without being forcibly subsumed within those of the partitioning powers. Medicine, it seemed, offered educated Polish liberals what politics had not: a place to ground their national belonging during the period in which they had been partitioned and colonized.
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Notes
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980 [1976]);
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For works that analyze German colonial perspectives of the eastern borderlands, see Kristin Kopp, “Contesting Borders: German Colonial Discourse and the Polish Eastern Territories” (Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001);
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The disease was commonly known as Asiatic cholera because before the nineteenth century there were few cases recorded in places outside India. According to Charles E. Rosenberg, although the extent to which cholera was spread before the nineteenth century is somewhat controversial, there is consensus among historians that the disease was endemic to India, especially to the Ganges River Valley. As commercial and colonial relations with India intensified, the disease started to leave Southeast Asia in 1817, reaching pandemic levels in 1832, 1848, and 1866. For further information on the spread of cholera, see Richard Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack, and Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005);
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Also known in English as the “Royal Prussian Colonization Commission” from the Polish “Królewska Komisja Kolonizacyjna” which was how most Poles referred to this organization at the time. See Robert Lewis Koehl, “Colonialism inside Germany: 1886–1918,” The Journal of Modern Europe 25, no. 3 (Septem ber 1953): 255–272;
Richard Blanke, Prussian Poland in the German Empire (1871–1900) (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1981);
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Heinrich Driesmas, Dämon Auslese: Vom theoretischen zum praktischen Darwinismus (Berlin-Ch.: VITA, Deutsches Verlagshaus, 1907), 84–85.
For further information on the Polish Eugenic Movement, see Teresa Ziółkowska, “The Origin of the Poznań Eugenic Society and Its Significance for the Development of Physical Culture in Poland,” Studies in Physical Culture and Tourism 9 (2002): 65–79, and
Magdalena Gawin, Rasa i nowoczesnóść: Historia polskiego ruchu eugenicznego (1880–1952) (Warszawa: Wydanictwo Neriton and Instytut Historii PAN, 2003).
Jerzy Durkalec and Kazimierz Janicki, “Powstanie Wielkopolskie (1918–1919) i jego medyczne zabezpieczenie,” Nowiny Lekarskie 69, no. 6 (2000): 556–563.
In her article about progressivism and eugenic movement in Poland, Magda Gawin briefly mentions how World War I allowed many leading eugenicists, such as Leon Wernic, to distinguish themselves and push for the establishment of eugenic agendas in the new Polish state. Physicians and eugenicists were most successful in the early 1920s when they were in full control of the Ministry of Public Health (dissolved in 1924). Gawin’s analysis of Polish medical activism in the interwar years failed to consider the political contributions of Poznanian physicians during the Second Republic of Poland. For example, according to Barbara Poznańska, Polish health practitioners from the former German Empire, were among the first ones to propose the creation of the Union of Physicians of the Polish State (Związek Lekarzy Państwa Polskiego, ZLPP), which had the goal to safeguard the interests of the medical class. See Magdalena Gawin, “Progressivism and Eugenic Thinking in Poland, 1905–1939,” in Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, ed. Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2007); and
Barbara Poznańska, “Środowisko lekarskie II Rzeczypospolitej,” in Insteligencja Polska XIX i XX Wieku, ed. Ryszard Czepulis-Rastenis (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1991).
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© 2012 Matthew P. Fitzpatrick
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Valerio, L.A.U. (2012). An Empire of Scientific Experts: Polish Physicians and the Medicalization of the German Borderlands, 1880–1914. In: Fitzpatrick, M.P. (eds) Liberal Imperialism in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137019974_8
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