Europe PMC Funders Group Author Manuscript Deltos. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 April 19. Published in final edited form as: Deltos. 2012 ; (PRIVATE AND PUBLIC MEDICAL TRADITIONS IN GREECE AND THE BALKANS): 13–16.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
Ancients and moderns: The rise of social history of medicine in the Balkans Marius Turda Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Why has the social history of medicine been so slow to develop in Greece and the Balkans? To answer this question fully would take more time than the compass of this short paper permits. In the following, I will focus, briefly, on three explanations. The first is academic. Social history of medicine, as many authors have convincingly argued, is not a single clearly defined intellectual strategy, but arises in a number of variations: geographical, cultural and political. Traditionally, the history of medicine in Greece and the Balkans has focused exclusively on the life and activities of important physicians. This Whiggish interpretation, chronicling the triumphal progress of medicine, is only to be expected, considering that in these countries, the history of medicine has been largely written by physicians, and from the perspective of the nation-state paradigm. As long as the history of medicine was dominated by an internal, national perspective there was little point in comparing medical developments in neighbouring countries. When not able to place it within its own national context, one simply traced the growth of a medical tradition to a Western environment, mostly France, Germany and Britain.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
The second explanation is far more politically charged. Dogmatic Marxism contaminated most of the medical scholarship produced during communism in countries like Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. Far from invisible, the dominance of ideology challenged all claims to objectivity to which scholarship has always aspired. As political pressures hardened, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, medical scholarship became increasingly vitiated by a political agenda. Finally, the third explanation that must be mentioned is the history of medicine’s relationship with state nationalism. Modern Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria were all established in the nineteenth century; an independent Albania was proclaimed in 1912 and Yugoslavia was created after the First World War. During this often-turbulent period in Balkan history, medicine was viewed as essential to the process of state and nation-building projects, assisting other disciplines in the search for the nation’s former glory, both culturally and politically. The Balkan countries, moreover, were and are religiously and ethnically heterogeneous. Not surprisingly, perhaps, then that nationalism figured prominently in the dominant medical discourses elaborated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under these circumstances, medicine became part of a larger nationbuilding agenda, serving as a vehicle for transmitting a social and political message that transcended opposing ideological camps.
Turda
Page 2
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
One of the most important corollaries to these developments was the physician’ extensive social and national involvement. Starting with the mid-nineteenth century, a physician became more than just a healer caring for patients (as during the Enlightenment); he (and increasingly she) was a social activist, expressing a new form of professional loyalty, one through which medical knowledge addressed moral and ethical questions pertaining to the health of the nation and society. To an extent that has not been fully acknowledged, the current fetishisation of the medical profession in the Balkans, the hallmark of most histories of medicine produced in these countries, is to be found in the symbiotic relationship between the nation-state and its medical elites. The point is therefore not to talk about the emergence of the medical profession in the Balkans in isolation, but to locate it within those currents of thought and institutional efforts that most compellingly produced canonical interpretation of national history in this region. During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, medicine contributed to the formation, consolidation, and confirmation of national identities in the Balkans as much as other disciplines. Physicians projected medical ideas onto the national body, but they did so by assuming the existence of a distinct national character. New regimes of health and hygiene were instituted in the Balkans, beginning with the nineteenth century, within which state intervention in the name of the nation was normalized. It was assumed that with the help of the state, health experts could control and regulate the nation’s biological life. This form of scientific management based on medical education and schemes of hygiene and public health became central to the professionalization of medicine in Greece and the Balkans.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
To be sure, the process of embracing modern theories of health and hygiene did not occur simultaneously across Greece and the Balkans, nor was the spread of medical education — let alone the extent of medical institutionalization — similar. To give a few examples: the Ionian Academy was founded in 1824 in Corfu and included a faculty of medicine; the Imperial School of Medicine was established in Istanbul in 1827, and it soon became a centre for medical training for generations of physicians in the Balkans. The first medical faculty in modern Greece was founded in 1837 in Athens; a National School of Medicine and Pharmacy was established in 1856 in Bucharest. Yet the rest of the countries in the region had to wait until the twentieth century: in Serbia, the first medical faculty opened only in 1905; in Bulgaria, in 1918; and in Albania in 1952. Until these institutions were established, there was a consistent lack of trained medical personnel in these countries; physicians needed to be trained abroad, and many could only afford this elite education through scholarships, initially private, from various benefactors. Well into the twentieth century, generations of medical students from Greece and the Balkans benefited from this transfer of knowledge by way of studying under leading specialists of distinct medical disciplines in various European universities. Often these medical students would later engage with private initiatives in combating diseases and epidemics, as well as contributing to the building of national health systems in their own countries. To some extent, the values of Western medicine became the standard against which medical traditions in Greece and the Balkans were ultimately assessed.
Deltos. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 April 19.
Turda
Page 3
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
I hasten to note that no transfer of knowledge is unilateral. The Balkans have undoubtedly recurrently absorbed external medical knowledge, but regions and cultures are both interrelated and interdependent. The process of adopting medical values and practices was a horizontal movement, not a vertical one with the West on top as the unique source of knowledge and power. The emergence of modern medicine in Greece and the Balkans should therefore be seen as part of larger European labyrinth of intertextual and existential relations. It is only when private and public medical traditions in Greece and the Balkans are viewed in a comparative framework that one can suggest a more integrative interpretation, one that is equally attentive to historical idiosyncrasies and regional similarities. What is needed now is a comparative theoretical framework, so that different histories and stories about these different medical traditions can be unveiled and critically examined. Monographs and edited volumes are gradually being published both in and about the countries in the Balkans, a trend not only driven by the emergence of a new generation of medical historians but with equal importance one that is defining the crystallization of social history of medicine as a discipline in the region. A number of factors contribute directly to this process, including improved access to archives, the influx of Western scholarship and, most importantly, scholars from the Balkan countries studying abroad. In pursuit of its new identity, social history of medicine in Greece and the Balkans should not only bring together significant themes and developments in medicine as part of social history, political demography and cultural anthropology, but should also forcefully engage with some of the most central topics pertaining to the historical traditions of these countries more generally. This recourse to historical memory is essential if, on the one hand, the Balkan countries are to be reconciled with their troubled pasts and if, on the other, the history of medicine more generally is to be systematically analysed through its appropriate local, regional, national and international contexts.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
Social history of medicine’s importance to the general historiographic traditions in this region is yet to be acknowledged, but the fact that an increasing number of historians in the Balkans are interested in the history of medicine is already noticeable. Compared to the pre-1989 period, this emerging scholarship claims not to be vitiated by ideological manipulation and biased interpretations, though it remains to be seen whether these new intellectual projects will have the desired impact on the discipline of history in general, and on the history of medicine in particular. Current debates and contestations accruing around the meaning of national history in Greece and the Balkans yield eloquent examples of the ability of scholars in the region to produce different, almost competing, readings of the past. Social history of medicine too is currently undergoing a remarkable transformation — one defined on the one hand by society’s need to engage with scientific advances and the ethical dilemmas they raise, and by the inclusion of hitherto marginalised case studies on the other. The inclusion and juxtaposition of histories of medicine in Greece and the Balkans with their well-known Western European counterparts thus lies at the heart of the more ambitious historiographic project, a project that strives not only to yield original and timely archival research on neglected national case
Deltos. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 April 19.
Turda
Page 4
studies, but also to redefine and diversify the overarching debate on the centrality of medicine in modern European history.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
The time has finally come for the social history of medicine in Greece and the Balkans to be firmly situated within its own historiographic canon. To be sure, there remains room for improvement, especially in terms of methodology and access to archival collections. Above all, it is imperative that works of comprehensive synthesis are produced — studies that move away from narrow definitions of medical history and are theoretically and analytically robust. Besides the task of mediating between the local historiographic canons in the Balkans and their international context, there is a pressing need to tackle these phenomena within a framework of the region’s entangled history, more specifically to look at Greece and Balkan medical traditions, both private and public, from a cross-national perspective.
FURTHER READINGS 1. Turda, Marius. Focus on Social History of Medicine in Central and Eastern Europe. Social History of Medicine. 2008; 21:395–401. 2. Idem, (with Steve King), Sechel, D., editor. Medicine Within and Between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 18th and 19th Centuries. Bochum: 2011. Journeying across Empires: An Agenda for Future Research in Central and Southeastern European History of Medicine; p. 235-242. 3. Idem, Jackson, Mark, editor. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. Oxford: 2011. History of Medicine in Eastern Europe, including Russia; p. 208-224.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts Deltos. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 April 19.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
Ancients and moderns: The rise of social history of medicine in the Balkans Marius Turda Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Why has the social history of medicine been so slow to develop in Greece and the Balkans? To answer this question fully would take more time than the compass of this short paper permits. In the following, I will focus, briefly, on three explanations. The first is academic. Social history of medicine, as many authors have convincingly argued, is not a single clearly defined intellectual strategy, but arises in a number of variations: geographical, cultural and political. Traditionally, the history of medicine in Greece and the Balkans has focused exclusively on the life and activities of important physicians. This Whiggish interpretation, chronicling the triumphal progress of medicine, is only to be expected, considering that in these countries, the history of medicine has been largely written by physicians, and from the perspective of the nation-state paradigm. As long as the history of medicine was dominated by an internal, national perspective there was little point in comparing medical developments in neighbouring countries. When not able to place it within its own national context, one simply traced the growth of a medical tradition to a Western environment, mostly France, Germany and Britain.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
The second explanation is far more politically charged. Dogmatic Marxism contaminated most of the medical scholarship produced during communism in countries like Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. Far from invisible, the dominance of ideology challenged all claims to objectivity to which scholarship has always aspired. As political pressures hardened, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, medical scholarship became increasingly vitiated by a political agenda. Finally, the third explanation that must be mentioned is the history of medicine’s relationship with state nationalism. Modern Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria were all established in the nineteenth century; an independent Albania was proclaimed in 1912 and Yugoslavia was created after the First World War. During this often-turbulent period in Balkan history, medicine was viewed as essential to the process of state and nation-building projects, assisting other disciplines in the search for the nation’s former glory, both culturally and politically. The Balkan countries, moreover, were and are religiously and ethnically heterogeneous. Not surprisingly, perhaps, then that nationalism figured prominently in the dominant medical discourses elaborated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under these circumstances, medicine became part of a larger nationbuilding agenda, serving as a vehicle for transmitting a social and political message that transcended opposing ideological camps.
Turda
Page 2
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
One of the most important corollaries to these developments was the physician’ extensive social and national involvement. Starting with the mid-nineteenth century, a physician became more than just a healer caring for patients (as during the Enlightenment); he (and increasingly she) was a social activist, expressing a new form of professional loyalty, one through which medical knowledge addressed moral and ethical questions pertaining to the health of the nation and society. To an extent that has not been fully acknowledged, the current fetishisation of the medical profession in the Balkans, the hallmark of most histories of medicine produced in these countries, is to be found in the symbiotic relationship between the nation-state and its medical elites. The point is therefore not to talk about the emergence of the medical profession in the Balkans in isolation, but to locate it within those currents of thought and institutional efforts that most compellingly produced canonical interpretation of national history in this region. During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, medicine contributed to the formation, consolidation, and confirmation of national identities in the Balkans as much as other disciplines. Physicians projected medical ideas onto the national body, but they did so by assuming the existence of a distinct national character. New regimes of health and hygiene were instituted in the Balkans, beginning with the nineteenth century, within which state intervention in the name of the nation was normalized. It was assumed that with the help of the state, health experts could control and regulate the nation’s biological life. This form of scientific management based on medical education and schemes of hygiene and public health became central to the professionalization of medicine in Greece and the Balkans.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
To be sure, the process of embracing modern theories of health and hygiene did not occur simultaneously across Greece and the Balkans, nor was the spread of medical education — let alone the extent of medical institutionalization — similar. To give a few examples: the Ionian Academy was founded in 1824 in Corfu and included a faculty of medicine; the Imperial School of Medicine was established in Istanbul in 1827, and it soon became a centre for medical training for generations of physicians in the Balkans. The first medical faculty in modern Greece was founded in 1837 in Athens; a National School of Medicine and Pharmacy was established in 1856 in Bucharest. Yet the rest of the countries in the region had to wait until the twentieth century: in Serbia, the first medical faculty opened only in 1905; in Bulgaria, in 1918; and in Albania in 1952. Until these institutions were established, there was a consistent lack of trained medical personnel in these countries; physicians needed to be trained abroad, and many could only afford this elite education through scholarships, initially private, from various benefactors. Well into the twentieth century, generations of medical students from Greece and the Balkans benefited from this transfer of knowledge by way of studying under leading specialists of distinct medical disciplines in various European universities. Often these medical students would later engage with private initiatives in combating diseases and epidemics, as well as contributing to the building of national health systems in their own countries. To some extent, the values of Western medicine became the standard against which medical traditions in Greece and the Balkans were ultimately assessed.
Deltos. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 April 19.
Turda
Page 3
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
I hasten to note that no transfer of knowledge is unilateral. The Balkans have undoubtedly recurrently absorbed external medical knowledge, but regions and cultures are both interrelated and interdependent. The process of adopting medical values and practices was a horizontal movement, not a vertical one with the West on top as the unique source of knowledge and power. The emergence of modern medicine in Greece and the Balkans should therefore be seen as part of larger European labyrinth of intertextual and existential relations. It is only when private and public medical traditions in Greece and the Balkans are viewed in a comparative framework that one can suggest a more integrative interpretation, one that is equally attentive to historical idiosyncrasies and regional similarities. What is needed now is a comparative theoretical framework, so that different histories and stories about these different medical traditions can be unveiled and critically examined. Monographs and edited volumes are gradually being published both in and about the countries in the Balkans, a trend not only driven by the emergence of a new generation of medical historians but with equal importance one that is defining the crystallization of social history of medicine as a discipline in the region. A number of factors contribute directly to this process, including improved access to archives, the influx of Western scholarship and, most importantly, scholars from the Balkan countries studying abroad. In pursuit of its new identity, social history of medicine in Greece and the Balkans should not only bring together significant themes and developments in medicine as part of social history, political demography and cultural anthropology, but should also forcefully engage with some of the most central topics pertaining to the historical traditions of these countries more generally. This recourse to historical memory is essential if, on the one hand, the Balkan countries are to be reconciled with their troubled pasts and if, on the other, the history of medicine more generally is to be systematically analysed through its appropriate local, regional, national and international contexts.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
Social history of medicine’s importance to the general historiographic traditions in this region is yet to be acknowledged, but the fact that an increasing number of historians in the Balkans are interested in the history of medicine is already noticeable. Compared to the pre-1989 period, this emerging scholarship claims not to be vitiated by ideological manipulation and biased interpretations, though it remains to be seen whether these new intellectual projects will have the desired impact on the discipline of history in general, and on the history of medicine in particular. Current debates and contestations accruing around the meaning of national history in Greece and the Balkans yield eloquent examples of the ability of scholars in the region to produce different, almost competing, readings of the past. Social history of medicine too is currently undergoing a remarkable transformation — one defined on the one hand by society’s need to engage with scientific advances and the ethical dilemmas they raise, and by the inclusion of hitherto marginalised case studies on the other. The inclusion and juxtaposition of histories of medicine in Greece and the Balkans with their well-known Western European counterparts thus lies at the heart of the more ambitious historiographic project, a project that strives not only to yield original and timely archival research on neglected national case
Deltos. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 April 19.
Turda
Page 4
studies, but also to redefine and diversify the overarching debate on the centrality of medicine in modern European history.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts
The time has finally come for the social history of medicine in Greece and the Balkans to be firmly situated within its own historiographic canon. To be sure, there remains room for improvement, especially in terms of methodology and access to archival collections. Above all, it is imperative that works of comprehensive synthesis are produced — studies that move away from narrow definitions of medical history and are theoretically and analytically robust. Besides the task of mediating between the local historiographic canons in the Balkans and their international context, there is a pressing need to tackle these phenomena within a framework of the region’s entangled history, more specifically to look at Greece and Balkan medical traditions, both private and public, from a cross-national perspective.
FURTHER READINGS 1. Turda, Marius. Focus on Social History of Medicine in Central and Eastern Europe. Social History of Medicine. 2008; 21:395–401. 2. Idem, (with Steve King), Sechel, D., editor. Medicine Within and Between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 18th and 19th Centuries. Bochum: 2011. Journeying across Empires: An Agenda for Future Research in Central and Southeastern European History of Medicine; p. 235-242. 3. Idem, Jackson, Mark, editor. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. Oxford: 2011. History of Medicine in Eastern Europe, including Russia; p. 208-224.
Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts Deltos. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 April 19.
