Nineteenth-century physiology in the making: Introducing West European experimentalism to the Russian context.

摘要

The dissertation is a study of the rise of laboratory science in nineteenth-century Russia. It explores the cross-national scientific connections, which emerged anew after the Crimean war, in the context of the 1860s reforms in Russia and of the development of ‘scientific medicine’ in Germany.; The thesis focuses on the signal role played by the military in the development of the first in Russia teaching-research laboratories at the St. Petersburg Medico-Surgical Academy. It explores how experimental and teaching practice and its methodology and instrumentation was disseminated from Germany to Russia, and how the innovative techniques and the improved apparatus introduced by I. M. Sechenov and I. F. Cyon into physiological research and teaching contributed to the growth of physiology into a modern scientific discipline. It also discusses the difficulties associated with doing laboratory sciences in Russia by foreground of Sechenov's professional moves, and allows us to picture contrasts in the attitudes and potentialities of War Ministry and Ministry of Education for the introduction of the laboratory.; Sechenov's blood gases and salt solution research and the reception of his methodology are placed within the context of the debate on the solution theory between D. I. Mendeleev and Wilhelm Ostwald's school in Germany.; Thus the thesis outlines the changes Russian scientific culture underwent during the “golden age” of its development in the second half of the nineteenth century wrought by the state, industrial, and military interests.