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Kurakin’s Complaint: The Vita as Autopathography

Sat, November 22, 8:00 to 9:45am EST (8:00 to 9:45am EST), -

Abstract

In 1704, a council of Moscow doctors charged with assessing Prince B. I. Kurakin's fitness for military duty determined that the ailing Petrine guardsman was too sick to return to his regiment and recommended that he take a water cure at a European spa. As Kurakin later noted in his autobiographical Vita, this diagnosis was based on a written description of his personal medical history, which he had composed himself, prior to his official medical examination. Significantly, this document -- known in early modern European medical practice as an “anamnesis” -- omitted any mention of the suspicion that Kurakin’s illness may have had “an admixture of an unclean disease” (as he admitted more than a decade later in another anamnesis). This omission was then reflected in the vague medical diagnosis given to the high-born Muscovite military servitor, who was told that he suffered from “melancholia,” “hypochondria,” and "scorbutic illness" (a catch-all early modern term for a variety of possible afflictions, including sexually transmitted disease). By analyzing the personal medical histories that Kurakin penned, first for his doctors and later for a non-medical audience of his aristocratic peers, this presentation hopes to shed light on the memory work performed by the prince's autopathography.

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