Pain or Suffering: Soldiers’ Bodies in Early Modern Russian Military Medical Documents

• In Event: Imperial Pain: Suffering, Whining, Pining, and Dying in the Russian Empire

Abstract

In particular across the latter part of the seventeenth century, the Russian Empire not only sent out field surgeons with its armies but also had those medics write reports on those wounded fighting the Empire’s battles. The resulting reports are full of grotesque descriptions of what must have been incredibly painful battle wounds. Yet the reports themselves rarely mention pain, and even petitions from soldiers for treatment do not use pain as a major justification for their requests. Rather, the documents focus primarily on the functioning of bodies. In a handful of cases soldiers or medics note how battle wounds impacted their lives through loss of function, for example the loss of control over a limb. More commonly though was a focus on the inconvenience of a loss of function for the Empire. A whole genre of medio-military documents emerged which I call the “fitness for service” examinations. The sole purpose of these documents was to determine if the soldier could return to military service, to perform his correct function in the imperial war machine. These documents, then, were not about pain but were about suffering, occasionally the suffering of the wounded soldier, but more often how the Russian Empire suffered from the inconvenience of fragile bodies to its colonial ambitions.

Author

• Clare Griffin, Indiana U Bloomington