Russia and the Medical Drug Trade in the Seventeenth Century

Social History of Medicine Vol. 31, No. 1 pp. 2–23 Russia and the Medical Drug Trade in the Seventeenth Century Clare Griffin* Keywords: Russia; Early Modern; Drug Trade; Global History; European Medicine Russia in the seventeenth century had a particularly unusual form of official medicine: until 1654, all medical practitioners employed at court or in the army were foreigners from Western Europe.1 Even after that date, Russians made up only a small proportion of medical practitioners until the late eighteenth century.2 Similarly, the majority of medical books available in Russia were imported from Western Europe, translated from Western European texts, or compiled from Western European sources according to Western European models.3 Other countries also brought in medical texts and practitioners from abroad, but to import so much of official medical practice was certainly atypical. Russia, then, seems a good candidate for a re-examination of the issue of early modern medical drugs, where the use of local versus foreign products has become a central question, as * Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Deutschland. E-mail: . Clare Griffin completed her thesis work on medical knowledge at the seventeenth-century Russian court at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Having previously held a post as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, she is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She works on medicine, the global medical drug trade, practical knowledge, translation and information technologies, particularly in the context of the early modern Russian empire. 1 After 1654 the department began training Russians as medical practitioners. The reasons for starting the training programme are unknown, but it may be significant that 1654 saw the start of the Russo-Polish war (1654–67), as well as plague outbreaks. Maria Unkovskaya, ‘Learning Foreign Mysteries: Russian Pupils of the Aptekarskii Prikaz, 1650–1700’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, 1997, 30, 1–20. 2 Andreas Renner, Russische Autokratie und europ€ aische Medizin. Organisierter Wissenstransfer in 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010), 55. 3 Clare Griffin, ‘In Search of an Audience: Popular Pharmacies and the Limits of Literate Medicine in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 2015, 89, 705–32. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1093/shm/hkw106 Advance Access published 16 November 2016 Summary. This article deals with the trade in medicines into Russia in the seventeenth century. Both the early modern medical drug trade, and Russian medicine, have previously received substantial attention, but no work has thus far been undertaken on the Russian angle of the drug trade. Drawing on previously unused documents, this article traces the kinds of drugs acquired by the Moscow court. In contrast to the dominant view of official Russian medicine as divorced from native healing practices and fundamentally reliant upon Western European trends, these documents reveal that drugs were sourced as locally as Moscow markets, and from as far afield as East Asia and the Americas, but that not all drugs were accepted. As many of these imports came through Western European markets, this article also sheds further light on what drugs were available there, demonstrating the great diversity of drugs traded in early modern Europe. Russia and the Medical Drug Trade in the Seventeenth Century 3 4 The only works to devote attention to the drug trade are John Appleby, ‘Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great: British Formative Influence on Russia’s MedicoApothecary System’, Medical History, 1983, 27, 289– 304; V. N. Shkunov, ‘Aptekarskii prikaz i vneshniaia torgovlia Rossii v XVII–nachale XVIII vv.’, Moskovskoe nauchnoe obozrenie, 2011, 6, 2–3; B. Z. Nanzatov and M. M. Sodnompilova, ‘Lekarstvennye sredstva v torgovo-obmennykh operatsiiakh mezhdu Rossiei, Mongoliei i Kitaem v XVII–XIX vv.’, Vestnik nauchnogo tsentra Sibirskogo otdeleniia Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 2014, 4, 90–8. 5 Jarmo T. Kotilaine, Russia’s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century: Windows of the World (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 11. 6 See Wilhelm Richter, Geschichte der Medicin in Russland 3 vols (Moscow: N. S. Vsevoloski, 1813–17); N. P. Zagoskin, Vrachi i vrachebnoe delo v starinnoi Rossii (Kazan: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo universiteta, 1891); N. Ia. Novombergskii, Cherty vrachebnoi praktike v Moskovskoi Rusi (kultur’no-istoricheskii ocherk) (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1904); N. Ia. Novombergskii, Nekotorye spornye voprosy po istorii vrachebnogo dela v do-Petrovskoi Rusi (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1903); M. B. Mirskii, Meditsina Rossii X–XX vekov. Ocherki istorii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005); M. B. Mirskii, Ocherki istorii meditsiny v Rossii XVI–XVIII vv. (Vladikavkaz: Reklamno-izdatelskoe agentstvo Goskomizdata RSO-A, 1995); Unkovskaya, ‘Learning Foreign Mysteries’; Maria Unkovskaya, Brief Lives: A Handbook of Medical Practitioners in Muscovy, 1620– 1701 (London: Wellcome Trust, 1999); Sabine Dumschat, Ausl€ andischer Mediziner im Moskauer Russland (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006); Eve Levin, ‘The Administration of Western Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Russia’, in Jarmo Koitlaine and Marshall Poe, eds, Modernizing Muscovy. Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth Century Russia (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 353–79; M. Sokolovskii, Kharakter i znachenie deiatelnosti Aptekarskogo prikaza (St Petersburg: P. P. Soikin, 1904). the whole official medical system until 1654 (and even after that) was arranged around importing medicine. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that so little attention has been devoted to medical drug imports to Russia; although drugs have received peripheral attention in works focusing on other aspects of Russian medicine or trade, no one has ever used these records as a group to shed light on Russian involvement in the early modern medical drug trade.4 There are problems in tackling the Russian question. Very few customs records, so important to trade studies, are extant for Russia; not a single seventeenth-century custom book for the vital early modern Russian port of Arkhangelsk survives.5 Such documentary problems shift the study of the Russian medical drug trade in a specific direction, towards the reco (...truncated)