the Polish sciences, the one who opened up the medical profession to Prussian-Polish members of the middle and lower-middle classes. He also set many of the parameters for the foundation of medical and scientific organizations in defense of Polish culture. His political engagements in the first half of the nineteenth century had significant influence on Polish medicine and the political mission of Polish physicians in the region.
After Marcinkowski’s death, the main organization in charge of the promotion of Polish culture and scientific activities was the Poznanian Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauki) (PTPN). The initiative to form PTPN came from Kazimierz Szulc in 1856. Szulc, a Poznanian ethnographer, teacher, and journalist, met with about sixty people from the area to discuss the project. The organization was established a year later following the model of the Warsaw Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Warszawskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk).95 The Varsovian society had been created in 1800 with the goal of expanding Polish scientific knowledge, but was shut down in 1832 due to the Russification policies introduced in the Kingdom of Poland after the November Uprising. In Posen, members of the PTPN took an active role in countering Germanizing projects and in protecting the Polish language. The society was also connected with other organizations and with the main local newspaper, Dziennik Poznański (Poznanian daily), founded in 1859 by Karol Libelt, a liberal political activist and president of PTPN from 1868 to 1875.96
From the beginning, PTPN was a multidisciplinary organization that sought to cultivate Polish literature, sciences, and history. It also aimed to join efforts to counter anti-Polish religious and political attacks in the region. The society was inaugurated in 1857 with two sections, the Department of Historical and Moral Sciences (Wydział Nauk Historycznych i Moralnych) and the Department of Natural Sciences (Wydział Nauk Przyrodniczych). The latter was directed by Ludwik Gąsiorowski, a Poznanian physician trained in Breslau, considered the father of Polish medical history.97 The Department of Natural Sciences had a chemical laboratory, and one of its major goals was the establishment of a museum of natural history. The membership of the PTPN continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, and the organization was further divided into several departments and commissions. In 1865, physicians formed their own section and separated from the Department of Natural Sciences. The Medical Department, which started with twenty-five members, rapidly expanded, having followers from the Prussian-Polish provinces and several cities in the Kingdom of Poland, Lemberg (Lwów), St. Petersburg, Berlin, Kiev, and many other places. Moreover, the department managed to found in 1889 the first Polish medical journal in Germany, called Nowiny lekarskie (Medical news).
The Society for Academic Aid and PTPN were the two primary institutions that enabled the consolidation of the Polish medical profession under the German Empire. While the former helped increase Polish representation in the profession, traditionally dominated by Germans until the 1880s, the latter allowed for the creation of an intellectual milieu in which the new class could form a cultural basis for their scientific works and political activism. These institutions, established mainly in reaction to Germanization projects and an overall need for the modernization of the lands, allowed many Polish physicians to carry out their research agenda, discuss their findings, and elaborate their own theories about disease causation. In addition to this, they kept statistical records of diseases and educated others about hygienic matters.
This chapter has analyzed the salient discourses that Germans developed concerning the eastern borderlands in the context of the political and cultural conflicts that influenced Polish-German relations during the first half of the nineteenth century. It has pointed to the works of Gustav Freytag, Georg Forster, Immanuel Kant, and Rudolf Virchow as examples of the ethnographic and literary accounts that provided the basis for a civilizing mission in the area and helped put the Polish question at the center of German liberal debates. Even the most sympathetic views of the provinces, such as Virchow’s account of Upper Silesian suffering in 1848, supported the idea that German colonization in the form of Germanizing policies and in the name of secularization and progress was the solution for the cultural integration of the Polish lands. For many German intellectuals, the Polish nobility and clergy represented the despotic ills they were trying to transform in the German lands, and the poor conditions of the masses were the consequence of the “backward” governance system that Poles had lived under in the past.
Two of the goals here have been to study the role of epidemic diseases in the creation of Polish and German identities, and to examine the emergence of Polish scientific organizations in the context of Prussia’s cultural and political endeavors in the region. Cholera and typhus epidemics contributed to the construction of the eastern borderlands as vulnerable areas, which led to calls for the expansion of the medical profession and served to underscore the dangers the lands posed for Germans in the region and the German nation. The German administration tended to read the cultural contacts between Poles from Prussian Poland and the other two Polish partitions as biopolitical threats that could spread the infection of diseases, political instability, and uprisings.
The partitioned Polish lands were not only connected by diseases that migrated from east to west but also by images of uncleanliness and underdevelopment. These views were disseminated in numerous German medical reports and travel accounts of the time. In the early nineteenth century, a person traveling through the Polish lands could hardly tell the difference between the Prussian borderlands and the Kingdom of Poland. For example, in 1828, a French traveler echoed the same images of pollution typically found in German works.98 The anonymous author expressed positive views about the progress of German cities, but when he reached the Prussian-Polish provinces he only made comments about Polish uncleanliness and dangerous lifestyles.
In the description by this French traveler, the “inhospitable” conditions began as soon as he and his wife arrived in the town of Schneidemühl (Piła) in the Grand Duchy of Posen, and the progressive increase in dirtiness (la malpropreté) thereafter signified reaching the old lands of Poland (l’ancienne Pologne). For the author, the level of uncleanliness and insecurity he experienced linked the German eastern borderlands to Poland, despite the territories being officially part of Prussia. In “Poland” (by which the author meant Thorn), people often gave the travelers wine and beer to drink due to the poor quality of the water. Once they crossed the border into “real Poland,” conditions worsened and they encountered more misery. The account describes the road between the towns of Lipno and Płock in the Kingdom of Poland as a second Sahara Desert. The author claims that, on their way back to Prussia, the border town of Ostrowo would have looked much dirtier had they not just come from the other side of the frontier.
This account was reviewed in the Varsovian journal Kolumb: Pamiętnik podróży (Columbus: Travel diary). The author was severely criticized for his lack of impartiality and even hatred towards Poles and for his “preposterous, false, and derogatory” accounts of the Polish population and lands.99 According to the Polish commentator, Poles had not yet achieved the level of intellectual education attained by Germans, French, and British, but they were quickly approaching it.100 Therefore, it was wrong to generalize and associate such images of backwardness with the Polish character, extrapolating from a few examples without taking into consideration Polish efforts. This incident shows how Poles were, since early in the nineteenth century, consumers of such travel accounts and how these images had significant effects on Polish cultural identity and perception. The need to “catch up” with other (West) European powers was not only a concern of Polish intellectuals in Warsaw. In Prussian Poland, this concern, along with anti-Polish measures and colonial envisioning of the territories, helps explain the central role that scientific organizations and medical knowledge played in Polish-German relations.
2
Disease, Race, and Space
THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY saw the advent of experimental science in the German lands. Jacob Henle, an ophthalmologist and pathologist from Bavaria, started this movement in 1840 when he published his work on disease communication, Pathologische
