Abstract
"Winter certainly must take the lead": Challenging Climate Determinism at the Russian Academy of Sciences
The European medical community sat at a crossroads in the eighteenth century. Increased settler colonialism and ongoing explorations in the Pacific and the Arctic challenged medical knowledge. There was not a single principle to explain the effects of climate on the body, but rather a nested set of ideas that offered varied theories and suggested potential opportunities. Modern scholars sometime refer to this notion as climate determinism, an idea that the climate "predetermined" health, but it was not a single theory but rather a debate theorizing the intersection of climate, physical bodies, and geography. The origins of these arguments came from the Hippocratic corpus that had always linked "Airs, Waters, and Places" to body types. By the seventeenth century, naturalists and physicians explored two theoretical outcomes of this inherited wisdom. The first was the connection between peoples and the environment in which they lived, and the second was whether Europeans could acclimatize (or adapt) in new environments successfully. There were as many answers to the questions as there were men producing texts. For European settler colonialism to continue, solutions for assuring healthy bodies in diverse climates needed to be found.
As European naturalists debated the evidence, Russia faced criticism for its extreme climate. By the 1740s, the Academy of Sciences was actively investigating the climate not only to respond to its critics but also to produce new knowledge about the relationship between climate and imperial bodies. However, not all of the evidence gathered presented a positive assessment of Russia's climate. Peter Simon Pallas and Johann Gottlieb Georgi, for example, observed the unhealthy consequences of Russia's climate on its indigenous populations in their expeditions for the academy. Their work supported those naturalists who believed that the climate predetermined overall health and could not be overcome. However, others refuted this idea. Dr. Matthew Guthrie began his Russian career as a surgeon for the Admiralty during the Russo-Turkish War (1769-1774) and then became the Chief Medical Office to the Land Corps of Noble Cadets from 1778 until his death in 1807. Guthrie's Dissertation on the Climate of Russia (1790) relied upon the Academy's previous fifteen years of weather and temperature records to assess the impact of Russia's extreme climate on its subjects. From the evidence and his personal experiences, Guthrie concluded that "winter certainly must take the lead, … both from its duration and consequences in this northern situation." While winter may have dominated the year, "The air, though cold, is remarkably pure and elastic during our severe frost, so as to give a most surprising degree of spring and tone to the human frame. Though some field reports such as Pallas's had a negative assessment, the Academy's ongoing data gathering allowed officials such as Guthrie to refute those claims and argue that the climate could be successfully managed. Guthrie"s position became increasingly popular in the Academy, leading academician William Tooke to conclude that that Russia's climate was "not prejudicial to health" in his own study of the empire in 1800. By then, Russia"s scientific consensus was that the climate was only a hurdle to imperial settlement rather than an impenetrable barrier.
– Matthew P. Romaniello, Weber State University
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