ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Curing with Light, Water, Mud, and Current: The Rehabilitation of Russian World War I “Mutilated Warriors”

• In Event: World War Histories of Science

English Abstract

The increasing number of military invalids (called by contemporaries “mutilated warriors”) in the Russian Empire during World War I brought the goal of restoring their ability to work to the spotlight. This goal was significant for the state, given the economic crisis and the need to expand the labor force, as well as for the medical community, as they sought to ensure the complete recovery of the injured. Among restorative therapies, physical methods played a key role, including water, therapeutic muds, light, and electrical treatments. Although each had its own expert communities, theoretical foundations, and areas of application, non-specialists grouped them together as a single discipline: physiotherapy.
The implementation of physical methods depended not only on doctors' theoretical knowledge, but also on material infrastructure of medical institutions — the availability of special baths, lamps, apparatuses, and machines. Recognizing this widespread shortage, doctors advocated for the establishment of well-equipped specialist rehabilitation institutes, personnel training courses, and a network of national sanatoriums where apparatus therapy would be combined with the curative climate of the “healing area” (lechebnaya mestnost’).
Using materials from archival collections of state authorities and medical institutes, as well as medical journals and related publications, I plan to investigate how types of therapy correlated with types of physical injuries, and how their usefulness was justified from scientific, psychological, and economic points of view. More broadly, it is interesting to examine how large-scale warfare traumatization influenced the institutionalization and development of knowledge about physical therapies, which became an integral part of preventive care and treatment for the population of the young Soviet state.

Author

• Olga Okhotnikova, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München