The article is devoted to the political circumstances that influenced certain decisions regarding the first two editions of the travel report of the Arab traveler Ibn Faḍlān from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars (921–922). The now-famous text of the voyage account, known as the Mashhad manuscript, was discovered in 1923 by a Turkish orientalist of Bashkir origin, Ahmed Zeki Velidi Togan (1890–1970) and formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Vienna in 1935. Due to various problems, the German translation (in book form) was only published in print in 1939. The same year saw the publication of a Russian translation of the voyage description by a Soviet Arabist – Andrei P. Kovalevskiy (1895–1969). Both scholars conflicted with the USSR authorities: Togan had fought with the Soviet Army in 1920–1923, while Kovalevskiy was sentenced to five years in the gulag in 1938 on (as it later turned out) a wrongful charge of counterrevolutionary activity. These circumstances unexpectedly influenced the scholarly study of Ibn Faḍlān’s medieval work, incorporating it into the USSR’s domestic and foreign policy at the time.

Clerical persons conducted a variety of botanical research in Poland and Polish lands. The purpose of this article is to describe their achievements in this field of science. No comprehensive study of the clergy’s contribution to the development of this branch of science has been made so far. The study is based on the biographies of botanists and amateur botanists from The Biographical Dictionary of Polish Botanists which is being prepared for publication. The Dictionary comprises 1,773 biographies, including 69 clerical persons. Among these 69 people, the largest group form Catholic priests (21), followed by Jesuits (12, including 1 ex-Jesuit), Protestant clergy (6), and Piarists (6, including 2 ex-Piarists). The fewest were archbishops and subdeacons (1 person each). Among the botanists active in Poland and Polish lands, no clergy of non-Christian denominations were identified. The share of clergy in the total number of botanists was not substantial. They were in the majority only during the period when medical botany flourished (from the mid-14th century to the last quarter of the 16th century). Among the many branches of botany, floristics was most often practiced by the clergy, with as many as 36 people publishing works in this field, followed by ecology (14 people), popularization of botany (7 people), and phycology (5 people). Other branches of botany were less frequently practiced: medical botany and systematics – by 4, ethnobotany, phytogeography, physiology, mycology, nature conservation, and paleobotany – by 3, history of botany and pteridology – by 2, and anatomy, bryology, cytology, dendrology, lichenology, morphology, botanical engraving – by 1 person. With the increase in the number of botanists and the rapid development of experimental-laboratory branches of botany, the importance of clergy in the development of plant science in Poland has started to decline.

The article describes the life of Jerzy Budzyński, born in 1892 in Warsaw, a student of the gymnasium branch of the Warsaw E. Konopczyński School, a student of the Belgian University of Liège, and a graduate of the Warsaw University of Technology. Fragments of his unpublished diary show how Polish independence organizations were formed in the early 20th century: the Association of Polish Progressive and Independence Youth “Filarecja”, the Union of Active Struggle, the Riflemen’s Association, and the Polish Military Organization. The content of the justifications for the applications for the threetime decoration of the Cross of Valor document Jerzy Budzyński’s participation in the capture of the Mokotów Airport in Warsaw in November 1918 and the self-sacrificing fight in defense of Łomża against the Soviet III Cavalry Corps of Gai-Khan (Gai Dmitrievich Bzhishkyan), at the end of July 1920. During the interwar period, Budzyński was the head of the Road Traffic Division of the Road Department in the Ministry of Transport, creating conditions for the development of road transport and the construction of modern roads in Poland. After the war, as the head of the Poviat Road Administration in Grójec, he rebuilt roads and bridges, e.g. using bridge structures donated by the United Nations Relief and Reconstruction Administration (UNRRA). Budzyński ended his professional career working at the Central Research and Development Center for Road Technology (currently the Road and Bridge Research Institute) as the manager of the Center for the Scientific, Technical and Economic Information and Documentation, disseminating world achievements in road technology in Poland. Jerzy Budzyński’s personal file has been preserved in the archives of the Road and Bridge Research Institute, containing source documents of great value for research on the history of Poland in the 20th century.

The article aims to draw attention to the epidemic situation in the southern Ukrainian lands from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century and to analyze the activities of port quarantine departments of the Black and Azov Seas during this period. The research employs problem-chronological, comparative-historical, statistical and biographical methods. The analysis is based on the sources from the Regional Archives of the Mykolaiv Region and relevant scientific literature. The study reveals the condition of the epidemic-driven country in the period in question, the activities of quarantine departments at the ports of the Russian Empire, as well as how the state and local authorities fought the infections. Reading from archival sources, the author discusses the level of hygiene on military ships, the methods of fighting epidemics, and people’s reactions to quarantine, especially in the Mykolaiv region at the beginning of the 20th century. The epidemic situation in the southern Ukrainian lands from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century resulted from an imperfect policy of the Russian Empire - poorly-developed medical, social, and cultural spheres. It should be noted that during this period, infectious diseases often came to Ukrainian lands from the east. Their spread was facilitated by increased urban population, the movement of military contingents, water contamination by municipal and industrial waste, and insufficient knowledge of social and personal hygiene almost until the end of the 19th century. The main method of preventing epidemics was the introduction of quarantine. It meant full isolation of potentially dangerous ships arriving in port, inspecting them and supplying passengers and crew with quarantine measures.

This article aims to analyze (from autopsy) mathematical motifs in the frontispieces to selected seventeenth-century Polish technical-military treatises (by Adam Freytag, Kazimierz Siemienowicz and Józef Naronowicz-Naroński). The frontispiece is considered here an iconographic source for the history of science and technology. The rationale for investigating this topic is the process of the progressive mathematization of technical knowledge in Europe in the 15th-18th centuries. It is the first study of this subject with regard to Polish technical-military writing. Only one other article is devoted to this issue (Delphine Schreuder, When Mars Meets Euclid. The Relationship between War and Mathematical Sciences in Frontispecies of Fortification Treatises, 2021), but it does not cover the works of Polish authors. There are also several general studies (mainly in art or architectural history) on frontispieces to fortification treaties (Armin Schlechter, Engraved Title Pages of Fortification Manuals, 2014, Jeroen Goudeau, Harnessed Heroes: Mars, the Title-page, and the Dutch Stadtholders, 2016). The analysis of the typographic compositions of the discussed frontispieces revealed three main motifs: 1. the connection between the art of war and mathematical knowledge, as far as the knowledge of fortification and artillery is concerned; 2. the degree to which those disciplines - both of which combine the practice of the battlefield with theory - were mathematicized; 3. the crucial importance of drafting and measuring instruments for these sciences. The article’s final section addresses the issue of the rhetorical and persuasive function of the frontispieces.

Despite the enormous progress in the development of medical sciences in recent decades, surgery is still associated with manual dexterity. The oldest surgical procedures were performed primarily with the hands, and only later with the use of tools that came up as a result of the adaptation of everyday devices. Scientific and technological progress, along with the growing experience of surgeons, influenced the evolution of surgical instruments, which changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. As in other areas of human activity, the most useful surgical tools have constantly evolved and have survived to our times in a form reminiscent of their most ancient precursors. Others, which did not work in practice, today are a curiosity and a trace which allows us to follow the development of surgical thought in the past.

The article presents the translation and edition of the report by Prof. Maksymilian Thullie, the Head of the Imperial-Royal Polytechnic School in Lviv, about the situation at the university during the Russian occupation of Lviv from September 1914 to June 1915. It describes the efforts of professors to preserve the collections and rooms from requisitions and destruction, to obtain livelihoods for employees, and to maintain the functioning of the university in the scope allowed by the invaders.

Wojciech Orliński, Kopernik. Rewolucje, Wydawnictwo Agora, Warszawa 2022, ss. 434

Piotr Łopuszański, Mikołaj Kopernik. Nowe oblicze geniusza, Wydawnictwo Fronda, Warszawa 2022, ss. 446

Two new biographies: Kopernik. Rewolucje (Warszawa 2022) by Wojciech Orliński and Mikołaj Kopernik. Nowe oblicze geniusza (Warszawa 2022) by Piotr Łopuszański, along with this year’s 550th anniversary of the astronomer’s birth, have triggered the reflection on how to write about Copernicus’s life and work. The article discusses popular and scientific biography as a genre and narrative model in the history of science and scrutinizes the criteria of “good biographical stories”. The work recalls examples of biographical writing on Renaissance thinkers (Leonardo da Vinci and Girolamo Cardano) and the techniques the authors used to humanize their protagonists for modern readers. The second part of the article focuses on analyzing the new Copernican biographies, noting the authors’ presence in the text, narrative strategies, and their attitude to sources and existing historiography. The final remarks concern the possibility of unifying the polyphonic discourse in Copernican studies and sharing new research with a wider audience.

The article discusses possible inspirations for medical historians resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The author analyzes the role of the history of medicine in the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation is understood as an opportunity for changes in Polish medical historiography in its non-classical sense. The author also investigates the narrative structures, showing how, in the context of a pandemic, such fundamental metaphors as pathogenesis, salutogenesis or pathocenosis could be used. The attention is also given to public discourse, inspiring the historian of medicine to address such notions as breakthroughs in science, the process of validating new medical knowledge during a pandemic crisis, or anti-science. The concept of pathocenosis as a theoretical framework for the scientific and public ‘COVID-related’ discourse was analyzed as a case study. The author treats this reflection as an invitation to discuss the changes in Polish medical historiography in the face of a medical crisis.