Eastern Healing in the Nervous Age: Tibetan Medicine, Kumys Cure, and Varieties of Embodied Orientalism in Fin-de-siècle Russia

• In Event: Shades of Russian Orientalism: Comparing Imperial Russian Entanglements with Islamic and Buddhist Easts

Abstract

Late imperial Russian society was preoccupied with health and healing. One may easily find a vignette from literary works of this period where the characters spend time in domestic or foreign sanatoria to recover from tuberculosis, syphilis, or other bodily malaise. Russian doctors heatedly debated the scientific value and efficacy of popular treatments in medical journals. As “scientific medicine” gradually gained ground in Russia following the “bacteriological revolution” and the introduction of zemstvo medicine, the struggle against charlatanism and traditional healing methods (znakharstvo) intensified among reform-minded Russian liberals. Yet, meanwhile, widespread fin-de-siècle anxieties about physical degeneration and nervous exhaustion opened up a space for a variety of Eastern healing methods that flooded the medical and spiritual marketplace.

The paper examines two healing practices of Eastern origins as case studies for scrutinizing the cultural semantics of different Easts in the Russian Empire: Tibetan medicine and the kumys cure (kumysolechenie). While Russian Buddhists (Buryats and Kalmyks) struggled to petition for Tibetan medicine’s legalization, which was eventually rejected, kumys cure developed into a thriving medical tourism industry with state endorsement as well as Western doctors’ serious interest in this drink’s therapeutic properties. I argue that contrasting reception histories of Tibetan medicine and kumys cure reflected different conceptualizations of the Buddhist and Islamic Easts among Russian state officials and patients from diverse social backgrounds. The paper also reflects upon the role of these “embodied Orientalisms” in demarcating the boundary between normative medical knowledge and pseudoscientific ones.

Author

• Liya Xie, Princeton U