Book Review: Doing medicine together: Germany and Russia between the wars

From its opening sentences, Doing medicine together appears self-evidently as an ambitious collection of essays exploring the multi-textured ties between Russian and German medicine and public health from 1919 to 1939. Thick with acronyms of Soviet and German institutions, bristling with hundreds of fleeting individuals, speckled with footnotes that ought to be read, and dusted with a layer of Russian and German phrases, Susan Gross Solomon's splendidly edited, extraordinary book is not for the faint-hearted. It demands diligence and perseverance, especially for the non-expert on contemporary Soviet–German history. It is worth the effort. There is now a vibrant scholarship in general, world, and global history analysing political and economic bilateral relationships between nation states. This trend has found comparatively less vogue in the history of medicine and science, where it usually appears only under the rubrics of internationalism, imperialism, colonial studies, or most recently studies of forced migration. While works by Ilana Lowy, Peter Galison, Susan Leigh Star, and John Pickstone have advanced comparative national studies of science and medicine theoretically, few historians have actually demonstrated through substantial archival research the ways cross-national and cross-cultural currents shaped the development of medicine and science. Hence, Doing medicine together. Through its eleven case studies this volume considers the complicated political-economic landscapes that characterized Rapallo-era Soviet–German relations, while also successfully establishing four historiographic frameworks for understanding the role of bilateralism in the national patterns of science and medicine. The volume's four sections are organized around themes that include friendship, entrepreneurship, internationalist versus bilateral motivations, and migration to the “Other”. The opening chapters by Paul Weindling, Marina Sorokina, and Michael David-Fox analyse the process of choosing medico-scientific friends. As these authors make apparent, this practice was, on the one hand, riddled with thinly veiled ambitions for personal prestige and international scientific stature, and on the other, unsurprisingly fraught by ideological suspicions commensurate with Communism in Russia and growing ultra-nationalism in Germany. Individuals and institutions alike thus found themselves tied to dual cultural and intellectual agendas: aims and agendas articulated abroad necessarily fit within political and cultural values at home. Yet, domestic interpretations—whether in Germany or Russia—might, and often did, weaken bilateral linkages. For the scientific entrepreneurs voluntarily situated within these consequently complex systems of intrigue and patriotism, the personal quest for medico-scientific knowledge and prestige required the ability to build institutions, networks of power, and new disciplines. Simultaneously, they had to assert the propriety of their actions to sceptics in both countries. Elizabeth Hachten, Wolfgang Eckart, Susan Gross Solomon, and Sabine Schleiermacher, expand upon this second framework, and use the enigmatic career of the German bacteriologist, hygienist, medical geographer, amateur historian of medicine, and “relentless self-promoter” Heinz Zeiss (p. 182) to illustrate the way entrepreneurial behaviour created fascinating contradictions. Zeiss, a right-wing nationalist, used various boundary objects, such as his access to the German-developed anti-trypanocidal Bayer 205, to build scientific networks within the Soviet scientific establishment. These networks eventually brought him considerable opportunities, including the ability to conduct field studies in the mainly trans-Volga region. They also provided him with access to German and Soviet patronage. Zeiss relied heavily on these networks as he attempted to create spaces for the new discipline of medical geography in Russia. Though working with entrepreneurial zeal, Zeiss's rationales for the new field predictably resulted in two distinct conversations and ultimately the failure of his project. His “sales-pitch” for medical geography in the Soviet Union missed its mark, chiefly because he did not fully comprehend the institutional ecology of Russian academic science and medicine. What is more, his conversation in Germany, laced with patriotic sentiment and rich with right-wing overtones of cultural policy, left him open to various charges, the best of which was probably hypocrisy. His delicate balancing act between nationalist excess and entrepreneurial relativism was probably sufficient grounds for his eventual expulsion from Russia in 1932. Zeiss was a representative medico-scientific entrepreneur. Indeed, many German (and probably Russian) scientists and physicians found that bilateral connections provided opportunities to test scientific hypotheses, pursue new lines of inquiry, and even find employment. Yet bilateral connections offered more. Increasingly, the 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of a new scientific internationalism that created a resulting dichotomy between national pride and international camaraderie. As this third framework reveals, Germany and Russia, both pariahs in the global scene, found themselves partnered in the geo-cultural dance that was international science politics. Theirs was an unlikely pairing. As the splendid chapters by Jochen Richter and Nikolai Krementsov record, the growing popularity of racial pathology and hygiene in interwar Germany placed the Soviets in the embarrassing position of reaching out to German expertise even as they publicly rejected much German medico-scientific theory. Such rejections eventually severed most bilateral arrangements by the mid-1930s. The rise of German Fascism, however, marked one final arena in which bilateral relations manifested. The German doctrine of racial purity, as well as the country's antipathy towards political Leftists, meant that numerous scientists and physicians found their home an increasingly unwelcoming environment. Those who could left for other countries, including the Soviet Union. The final chapters by Ulrike Eisenberg and Carola Tischler detail various conditions of forced-migration to the “Other”, the final framework considered in this volume. Despite a decade of close collaboration between the two countries, these chapters indicate that German physician-emigres did not find a completely warm reception in their newly adopted country. Moreover, they seem to have been unprepared for the realities of Russian Communism. Doing medicine together is a sophisticated examination of science and medicine cast in global terms, and it is an exemplary work of scholarship. Thus, even its limitations offer instructive lessons for historians engaged in similar methodologies. Although the chapters by Sorokina, David-Fox, and Krementsov give some flavour of the Russian side of this story, the volume focuses more on Germans in Russia than the reverse. This is partially an artefact—one third of the volume focuses on Zeiss's activities in Russia. Yet, this imbalance raises important questions. Were Russian scientists and physicians prevented from going abroad? If they left Russia, did they return home? Did they cultivate international friendships? Could they be “entrepreneurial”? Can that framework even apply to individuals or institutions from centrally planned economies? Did the rise of Communism ever lead to the migration of Russian scientists and physicians to Germany? Balanced transnational histories demand answers to such reciprocal questions, and this volume does not fully rise to that challenge. Obviously, the authors of this ambitious volume could not probe every problem or ponder every silence. Yet the depth of their sources indicates another difficulty arising from analysing transnational relations. It is not enough to know that actors and institutions are engaging in different conversations. Rather, those incomplete and often contradictory conversations exist within at least two fully formed contexts. The nuances of those contexts are difficult to develop adequately in writing, yet that development is crucial as it reveals the ways that political and economic forces shaped policy developments in medicine. Finally, although individuals and institutions re-emerge as the locus of transnational science and medicine, it is important to recognize that their work was comparatively superficial and insignificant. Transnational studies fascinate precisely because what they reveal to us about the development of national styles of science and medicine remains unclear.