Preface

Summary

Almost ninety years ago, in 1931, the Romanian historian of medicine Valeriu Bologa wrote an essay about the value of national historiographies. He rejected nationalistic approaches as unscientific but strongly argued for a national standpoint to allow for “optimum” and “maximum” results from researchers who are familiar with a specific context. However, for him the national perspective was only a start. He pursued a broader objective: he followed the idea that national perspectives should contribute brick by brick to a larger general understanding of the history of medicine. Consequently, he argued for international cooperation and syntheses.

Bologa's focus was the history of medicine in Eastern Europe, and he wrote in an era of nationalistic thinking. Thus, he is quite remote from the historiography of medicine focusing the Baltic between 1850 and 2015. Nevertheless, it is striking that even today Bologa's basic idea of the history of medicine as an international endeavor still seems to be an unachieved goal rather worth striving for.

Shifting time (away from 1931 to today) and space (from Eastern Europe to the Baltic Sea) in a historiographic approach illustrates the strength of comparative transnational perspectives: a whole national, cultural, political, and geographical background changes. The connotations of the collective terms Eastern Europe and the Baltic transport completely different ideas of lands, people, lives, languages, and cities. However, some features, like social inequalities in health or in the provision of care, seem to persist over time and space. In this tension lies the great benefit of transnational perspectives on the history of medicine. It is an immense task to investigate international networks of doctors; the movement of knowledge across borders; and the appropriation, change, and adaptation of ideas and practices in different political and cultural contexts in order to reconstruct and understand, for example, the triumph of physicochemical approaches in medicine all over Europe.

This book is just such a collaborative work that transgresses the national boundaries of medical history. These international historians of medicine contribute to an international perspective on their field by comparatively traversing the borders of states and minds located on and shaped by the Baltic Sea.