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From Transnationalism to Olympic Internationalism: Polish Medical Experts and International Scientific Exchange, 1885–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

KATHARINA KREUDER-SONNEN
KATHARINA KREUDER-SONNEN*
Affiliation:
Institute for the History of Medicine, University of Bonn, Sigmund-Freud-Str. 25, 53127 Bonn, Katharina.Kreuder-Sonnen@ukb.uni-bonn.de
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Abstract

The article analyses forms of international scientific exchange practised by Polish medical experts around 1900. Applying a transnational historiographical approach it asks whether and how the Polish nation mattered to Polish bacteriologists and epidemiologists travelling abroad or communicating with colleagues internationally. It shows that in the 1880s and 1890s the Warsaw bacteriologist Odo Bujwid rarely connected his scientific knowledge to Polish national causes but rather benefited from imperial structures. What was more, he transcended the borders between the two nationalised bacteriological thought styles of Louis Pasteur on the one hand and Robert Koch on the other. Bujwid thus eluded a clear link between science and nationalism. His practices of international scientific exchange can be called ‘transnational’. When a Polish state was re-established in 1918 bacteriology and epidemiology became closely entwined with Polish state- and nation-building. Polish medical scientists now worked for Polish state institutions and acted as state representatives in the international arena. International exchange and border-crossing scientific mobility now served, first of all, to underline Polish statehood and to present it as a modern and civilised country. These practices of international scientific exchange can be described as ‘Olympic Internationalism’.

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Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 25 , Issue 2: Agents of Internationalism , May 2016 , pp. 207 - 231
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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83 Balińska, For the Good of Humanity, 43.

84 Hirszfeld, Story, 11–28.

85 Weindling, Epidemics, 143–4; Balińska, Marta A., ‘Assistance and not Mere Relief: The Epidemic Commission of the League of Nations, 1920–1923’, in Weindling, Paul J., ed., International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 81–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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88 During the London conference the League members had decided to provide 3.25 million pounds to the Polish government to fight the disease. However, the promised donations would not come in. Only a year after the conference had governments paid a small part of the agreed sum enabling the established typhus commission to start supplying Polish health authorities with foodstuff and sanitary equipment. See Borowy, Coming to Terms, 49–50.

89 The LNHO consisted of a section functioning as a secretariat, a health committee of eight supposedly apolitical members and several sub-committees. See ibid. 63.

90 That international health politics played a role for the PZH and its employees becomes clear also with regard to its State School of Hygiene, established in 1926. The building was largely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as well as by donations from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. See Balińska, ‘National Institute’, 433. For the Rockefeller fellowship programmes see below.

91 The Poles were suspected of exaggerating and several ‘fact-finding-commissions’ came home with very ambivalent reports. See Borowy, Coming to Terms, 47–54.

92 Statement of result of discussion between Dr. George Buchanan and Dr. Edward John Steegmann with Colonel Hugh Cumming, 18 July 1919, cited in ibid. 42.

93 Ibid. 103–4.

94 Health Section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations, Weekly Record No 1, 1 April (Geneva, 1926).

95 Państwowy Zakład Higieny w Warszawie, Sprawozdanie z działalności za rok 1924 i 1925 (Warszawa 1926), 14.

96 Zasadnicza Ustawa Sanitarna z dnia 19 lipca 1919r., Dziennik Praw. Nr. 63, Poz. 371.

97 Okręgowy Urząd Zdrowia w Toruniu to district medical officers of Pomorskie Voivodship, 30 Jan. 1920, UWP w Toruniu 11860, Archiwum Państwowe w Bydgoszczy, Bydgoszcz, unpaginated.

98 Various correspondence, UWP w Toruniu 11860, Archiwum Państwowe w Bydgoszczy, Bydgoszcz; various correspondence, Akta m. Łodzi 19269, Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, Łódź.

99 Oddział Statystyczno-Epidemjologiczny P.S.H., Sprawozdanie z działalności za 1929 rok, MOS 606, unpaginated, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warszawa.

100 Okólnik Nr. 270, Nr. Z.Z. 6842/29, 2. Nov.1929, Urząd Wojewódzki Łodzki 3136 f, 52, Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, Łódź.

101 Ibid.

102 The Ukrainian national movement had fought an unsuccessful war against Poland in 1918/1919 to claim eastern Galicia for a Ukrainian state. Anti-Semitic pogroms had taken place in Lvov and other Galician towns between 1918 and 1920. The conflict concerning Silesia, Pomerania and Masuria between Germany and Poland became further manifest in local upheavals and general strikes. See Brzoza, Czesław and Sowa, Andrzej L., Historia Polski 1918–1945 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006), 29–49Google Scholar; Zloch, Stephanie, Polnischer Nationalismus: Politik und Gesellschaft zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (Köln: Böhlau, 2010), 38–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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107 During the First World War doctors had to report numerous deaths after treating soldiers with tetanus serum because different countries specified strength and effect of their sera in different ways. What was more, the unofficial centre of international standardisation, Paul Ehrlich's institute in Frankfurt, had lost its credibility with the events of the First World War. For a detailed discussion of the League's standardisation activities see Mazumdar, Pauline M., ‘“In the Silence of the Laboratory”: The League of Nations Standardizes Syphilis Tests’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 437–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mazumdar, Pauline M., ‘The State, the Serum Institutes and the League of Nations’, in Gradmann, Christoph and Simon, Jonathan, eds., Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 118–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Borowy, Iris, ‘Serological and Biological Standardisation at the League of Nations Health Organisation, 1921–1939’, in Bonah, Christian, Masutti, Christophe, Rasmussen, Anne and Simon, Jonathan, eds., Harmonizing Drugs: Standards in 20th-Century Pharmaceutical History (Paris: Éditions Glyphe, 2009), 203–20Google Scholar.

108 Clavin, Patricia and Wessels, Jens-Wilhelm, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations. Understanding the Work of Its Economic and Financial Organisation’, Contemporary European History, 14, 4 (2005), 465–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zaidi, Waqar, ‘Liberal Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology in Interwar Britain and the United States’, in Laqua, Daniel, ed., Internationalism reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars (London, New York: Tauris, 2011), 17–43Google Scholar.

109 Ibid. 119.

110 Hirszfeld, Story, 124.

111 Hirszfeld, Ludwik, ‘Stan współczesny serodjagnostyki kiły. Metodyka odczynów serodjagnostycznych w kile’, Medycyna Doświadczalna i Społeczna, 2 (1924), 402–39, esp. 419Google Scholar.

112 Ibid.

113 Extract from unknown newspaper, Jan. 1938, PZH 2/191, 3, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warszawa.

114 J.D. Rockefeller in memoriam. Przemówienie wygłoszono na uroczystości odsłonięcia płaskorzeźby J. D. Rockefellera w Państwowej Szkole Higieny w dniu 6 stycznia 1938r. w Warszawie (Warszawa 1938), 3.

115 Weindling, Paul J., ‘Public Health and Political Stabilization: Rockefeller Funding in Interwar Central/Eastern Europe’, Minerva, 31 (1993), 253–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116 From 1922 to 1939 there were forty-five PZH collaborators who were able to study in the United States on a Rockefeller grant. Anonymous, Notatka dotycząca udziału fundacji Rockefellera w budowie Państwowej Szkoły Higieny, 11 Sept. 1963, PZH 2/191, 1, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warszawa.

117 Various Correspondence, Laboratory Exchange/Poland, Document No. 28471x, LNA R. 852/26189, League of Nations Archive, Genève.

118 Schot, Johan and Lagendijk, Vincent, ‘Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years: Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity Networks’, Journal of Modern European History, 6, 2 (2008), 196–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clavin, Patricia, ‘Introduction. Conceptualising Internationalism Between the World Wars’, in Laqua, Internationalism, 1–14Google Scholar; Laqua, Daniel, ‘Internationalism ou Affirmation de la Nation? La Coopération Intellectuelle Transnationale dans l'Entre-Deux-Guerres’, Critique international, 52, 3 (2011), 51–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sluga, Glenda, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

119 Clavin and Wessels, ‘Transnationalism’; Zaidi, ‘Liberal Internationalist Approaches’.

120 Somsen, ‘History of Universalism’, 365–7.