UDC 340.6+614] (05) (091)

On the Centenary of the Journal Archive of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene

E. I. Lotova, Candidate of Medical Sciences (Moscow)

The political and social oppression prevailing in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s was an enormous obstacle to the initiatives of progressive members of the Russian intelligentsia who sought to improve the health of the population. Every step they took demanded extraordinary effort and a selfless struggle against the indifference and outright hostility of the tsarist

officials. Nevertheless, the ideas of public hygiene spread widely throughout the country. These ideas captured the minds not only of physicians but also of members of other groups within the Russian intelligentsia. The general and medical press published articles devoted to the aims of hygiene and its role in public life, its relationship to clinical medicine, disease prevention, physicians’ work in hygiene, and other subjects. The journals Sovremennik, Otechestvennye zapiski, Delo, and Russkoe slovo published numerous articles describing the harsh living conditions of the people and their poor health. V. V. Bervi-Flerovsky’s well-known work The Condition of the Working Class in Russia appeared chapter by chapter in Delo. The revolutionary democrats N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov, and D. I. Pisarev devoted considerable attention to questions of public health.

“...Hygiene, or the study of the conditions necessary for the preservation of health, is now acquiring paramount importance in the eyes of every thinking and knowledgeable person,” wrote D. I. Pisarev in 1865. “Each year it becomes less and less possible for the many different branches of public administration to ignore hygiene altogether.”¹

Questions of social medicine and hygiene were given fairly extensive coverage in Russian medical journals such as Moskovskaya meditsinskaya gazeta and Sovremennaya meditsina. Progressive Russian scientists saw in hygiene an opportunity to apply the achievements of the natural sciences to improving public health. Nevertheless, although progressive scientists and physicians were convinced advocates of hygienic measures, most physicians were unprepared to put them into practice.

“Our physicians,” observed the physician and publicist M. N. Shmelev, “are not only unprepared, either by study or by practice, to address questions of hygiene and investigate the effects of local sanitary conditions on the population: hygiene was taught at universities as a subsidiary subject, and students paid it almost no attention. Society, for its part, was utterly indifferent to sanitary questions, or simply ignored them.”²

The journal Archive of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene, which began publication 100 years ago, played an important role in the development and popularization of hygiene in Russia. The Archive was originally conceived as an official publication of the Medical Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The journal’s first issue, published in 1865, was edited by I. V. Bertenson. Beginning with the second issue, its editor was S. P. Lovtsov, a prominent figure in social medicine and a publicist. Thanks to his energy and organizational abilities, the Archive came to occupy a leading position among Russian medical periodicals. Bringing together a group of progressive physicians specializing in hygiene and public health workers, the journal developed a broad program of hygiene and became a distinctive center of public hygiene in Russia, a vehicle for disseminating hygienic knowledge, and an organizer of Russian physicians’ public health activities. S. P. Lovtsov’s closest assistants and active contributors to the Archive included G. I. Arkhangelsky, Yu. Yu. Gyubner, F. F. Erisman, V. O. Portugalov, I. I. Molleson, V. S. Snegirev, and others.

The topical importance of the issues raised in the journal and the strong democratic tendency of its work won it a broad readership, by no means confined to physicians. In 1868, the journal Delo wrote that the Archive could in a certain sense be considered the most

¹ D. I. Pisarev, Selected Writings on Education, 1938, p. 320.

² Collected Works on Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene, 1875, vol. 1, p. 208.

the best and most useful of all periodicals in Russia. To draw the attention of the medical community to sanitary issues, a section entitled “Public Hygiene” was established in the Archive. The journal raised questions closely connected with the country’s public life and publicized the work of progressive zemstvo activists. It published articles by prominent Russian hygienists A. P. Dobroslavin, F. F. Erisman, A. I. Yakobi, M. Ya. Kapustin, I. P. Skvortsov, and V. A. Subbotin, as well as by clinicians S. P. Botkin, V. A. Manassein, and others. These addressed various aspects of public and personal hygiene, the organization of zemstvo medicine, sanitary statistics, the fight against epidemics and infant mortality, and other subjects. Material on investigations into the sanitary conditions of cities appeared regularly.

From its earliest days, the journal advocated the development of scientific hygiene, the establishment of hygiene laboratories, and the training of physicians specializing in this field. The Archive’s emphasis on hygiene resonated widely among Russian physicians and accorded with their democratic ideal of serving the interests of the people. Medical-topographical descriptions occupied a prominent place in the journal. This form of comprehensive investigation, which incorporated elements of geography, climatology, economics, epidemiology, and hygiene, had emerged as early as the end of the eighteenth century. It became especially widespread in the 1860s and 1870s, as attention to sanitary issues and the task of improving the country’s health increased. In 1870 and 1871, the editors of the Archive published two volumes of the Medical-Topographical Collection, containing medical-topographical descriptions of Siberia, the Volga region, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and other regions. These descriptions reflected the efforts of progressive medical professionals to identify how living conditions affected the health of the population, with a view to improving those conditions and combating disease.

The journal’s editors paid particular attention to the organization of the medical community. The Archive highlighted the sanitary and hygienic orientation of the work of many medical societies of the time, including those of Kazan, the Caucasus, Podolia, Minsk, Kharkov, and Odessa. In 1869, it published the “Standard Charter” for a municipal medical society. Under this charter, medical societies were to study sanitary conditions in their respective provinces, draw up sanitary maps and medical-topographical descriptions, investigate the conditions under which epidemic and non-epidemic diseases developed, collect and analyze statistical data on morbidity and mortality, publish popular works, deliver lectures, and so on. Publication of the charter furthered the development of a hygienic orientation in the activities of many medical societies.

The disintegration of serfdom and the growth of capitalist relations in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century led to the rapid growth of new cities and older industrial centers. Cramped housing, overcrowding, and contamination of soil and water sharply worsened the sanitary conditions of the population and created conditions conducive to more severe epidemics, which harmed not only the lives, health, and well-being of the people but also the country’s economy as a whole.

In 1865, beginning with the journal’s fourth issue, a section entitled “Materials for Epidemiology” was introduced. It published scientific, informational, and review material on the spread of epidemics and efforts to combat them in Russia and abroad. In particular, the journal published a detailed account of the international sanitary conference in Constantinople, where disagreements emerged among the participants over the role of the external environment in the transmission of infection. The majority of the participants

The conference entirely ignored this link or assigned it a secondary role. The epidemiological conception formulated by S. P. Botkin, S. P. Lovtsov, G. I. Arkhangelsky, and others, in keeping with the views of Russian medical science, held that the principal epidemiological factors, apart from the pathogen, were to be sought in environmental conditions. Among these, decisive importance was attributed to the social conditions of the population’s life. The Epidemiological Leaflet, a supplement to the Archive, stated: “The connection between epidemics and the social order became apparent of itself. Epidemics acquired an entirely different, social significance: they came to serve as a reliable measure of the wealth and poverty, civilization and ignorance of peoples, and as an expression of the existing deficiencies and disorders in the living conditions of the masses.”¹

The journal’s editor, S. P. Lovtsov, was among the first to respond to S. P. Botkin’s proposal to establish an epidemiological society. The Archive carried material covering the clash of opinions surrounding Botkin’s proposal and published a draft of the society’s charter.

The journal’s effort to acquaint readers with the major works of political economy of the time gave it considerable social importance. The Archive was one of the first Russian journals to publish the principal arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital, doing so two years before the Russian translation appeared. In 1870, the journal’s third issue carried an article entitled “On the Condition of Workers in Western Europe from the Standpoint of Public Hygiene.” Its author, repeatedly citing Marx’s Capital, concluded that workers’ poor sanitary conditions were not accidental, but were “general phenomena characterizing the condition of the entire working class, not in any particular locality or country, but everywhere that relations between capital and labor have been established—that is, in all civilized countries.”² The tsarist government saw in the journal’s publication of this article, not without reason, “a persistent promotion of extreme socialist ideas”; S. P. Lovtsov was removed from his position as editor, and copies of the issue containing the article were confiscated.

Writing to Z. Meyer about this event in January 1871, Karl Marx stated: “A ‘semi-official’ Archive of Forensic Medicine appears in St. Petersburg, in Russian. One of the physicians contributing to it published an article in the issue for the last quarter, ‘On the Hygienic Conditions in Which the Western European Proletariat Lives,’ in which the author chiefly quotes my book—and gives the source. The following misfortune resulted: the censor received a severe reprimand from the minister of the interior, the editor-in-chief was dismissed, and the issue itself—all copies that could still be seized—was burned.”³

After S. P. Lovtsov was forced to leave the journal, G. I. Arkhangelsky became its editor. In subsequent years, the Archive of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene changed its name several times. Thus, from 1872 to 1881, it appeared as the Collection of Works on Forensic Medicine, Forensic Psychiatry, Medical Police, Public Hygiene, Epidemiology, Medical Geography, and Medical Statistics. In 1882 it was replaced by the journal Herald of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene, and from 1889 it was renamed *Herald

¹ Archive of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene, 1870, book 1; Epidemiological Leaflet, no. 1, p. 7.

² Archive of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene, 1870, book 3, p. 163.

³ K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 33, pp. 146–147.

public hygiene, forensic and practical medicine,” which continued publication until 1917.

The publications that succeeded the Archive reflected the changing social conditions in Russia. As political reaction intensified, the journal gradually lost the social orientation that had characterized it in the 1860s.

Received May 15, 1965.