Kai Johann Willms1; 1 University of Basel, Switzerland
Discussion
The term "colonial medicine" is often associated with the use of medical institutions and practices by European powers as part of their rule over overseas colonies. In the colonial context, the tendency of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European state to regulate the bodily practices of its population in order to raise the general level of health took on a particular significance: the 'modernisation' and 'rationalisation' of medical practices in the colonies in accordance with the contemporary state of Western scientific knowledge could be interpreted as part of a 'civilising mission' towards the indigenous population, while at the same time serving the purpose of protecting European settlers from the spread of disease. Historians of the late Russian Empire have argued that similar tendencies can also be observed in Russian imperial rule over non-Russian peripheries – especially in the case of tsarist Central Asia, where the introduction of Western medicine was central to managing the relationship between the indigenous population and the colonial administration. The paper takes a closer look at another periphery of the late Russian Empire, where this relationship took a more ambiguous form: While an orientalist discourse of civilisational hierarchies was also present in Russian rule over the Caucasus, the imperial rulers and the indigenous population were not as segregated as in Central Asia, and the Europeanisation of health care in fin-de-siècle Tbilisi developed in a dynamic interplay of local and imperial initiatives. The ultimate failure of the Russian administration to meet local demands for medical modernisation became a powerful tool for indigenous activists to challenge the discourse of imperial superiority, exposing the fragility of cultural hierarchies in the late Russian Empire.
