Elena Vishlenkova

Having found conflicting versions of the past in publications on the history of Soviet medicine, the authors of the article problematized the evidence with which historians work. This led to the study of the production and interaction of statistical and narrative statements of the health care authorities of the 1930s, that is, their reporting and futuristic pipe dreams. The comparison of the medical statistics published in the official directories and the current reporting of medical institutions revealed discrepancies between the published and collected information. Criticism of the official figures by contemporaries gave researchers the opportunity to reveal material and construction technologies of a utopian reality, from the power of which even modern researchers find it hard to free themselves.

The author reveals an essence of bureaucratic knowledge by means of which the nature of educational management (of schools and universities) in the Russian Empire in the 1830s was changed. The article shows the difference between bureaucratic and scientific knowledge. The author proves that the organization of regular and universal data collection (in the form of reports and references) has created a system of collective responsibility, general employment, vertical circulation of information. At the same time, the content of the created knowledge did not influence the decisions of the Ministry of Public Education. Disciplinary and representative aspects of this practice – humility of professors and teachers participating in it, timely implementation of the instructions coming from above, the consistency shown in tables and the text of digital indicators were much more important for bureaucrats. Collected data were used by the Ministry to showcase the efficiency of control it exercised.

An official’s complaint about a Polish private doctor who treated his children for scarlet fever in 1827 gave rise to a unique document – a description of the treatment process and of the doctor’s interaction with patients, pharmacists, and Russian authorities. Such evidence is rarely found in the Russian archives. Since private doctors did not report to the officials, their testimonies, as a rule, are not preserved in the state archives. A text found in the archives of the Vilna Medical Board stimulated the authors of the present article to investigate the state of medical care and medical culture of the Polish population that became part of the Russian Empire after the Third Partition of Poland. Vishlenkova and Zatravkin have found that, unlike the rest of the Empire, a rather dense network of private medical care existed in Vilna province until the 1830s, and the level of scientific medical culture of the patients allowed them to establish control over treatment.