Against the backdrop of the continuing threat of plague epidemics, and mindful of theirinternational and media repercussions, the authorities in St. Petersburg established in 1897 the Commission for the Prevention and Control of Plague. This article examines the activities of the Commission, with particular attention to the results of its work, including both its recommendations and its organizational measures. The Commission’s activity should be understood as a complex outcome of the cultural construction of medical knowledge and practice within the broader framework of Russian statehood. Its work was shaped decisively by the structures of the imperial state, which – through administrative instruments of modernization such as quarantines, hospitals, and sanitary legislation – not only introduced new patterns of behavior but also legitimized a particular form of expert knowledge. At the same time, the Commission’s effectiveness was often constrained by the rigidity of the administrative apparatus, the intricacy of the bureaucratic system, and resistance from the medical profession, which was wary of government interference. Importantly, the Commission’s role extended beyond reactive responses to outbreaks. It was also an active participant in the broader process of the medicalization of social life, whereby public space was increasingly subordinated to the logic of health, hygiene, and biological order.
This article examines the origins of triage through an analysis of the four volumes of Mémoires de chirurgie militaire et campagnes by Dominique Jean Larrey, one of the most important reformers of military surgery at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The aim of the study is to reconstruct the practices of sorting and prioritising the wounded developed by Larrey in the context of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, while maintaining methodological caution toward the later, twentieth-century use of the term “triage”. Although Larrey did not employ triage as a technical term, the article demonstrates that his practices – including immediate fi eld intervention, prioritisation of treatment based on injury severity, the development of ambulances volantes, and the administrative classifi cation of wounded soldiers – fulfi l the core functional criteria of triage. A comparative analysis of Volumes I–IV reveals a conceptual development from clinical innovation, through organisational consolidation and mobile maturity, to institutionalisation combined with a pronounced ethical universalism. In its interpretative section, the article relates Larrey’s historical practices to contemporary bioethical debates, particularly the tension between patient autonomy and the utilitarian and deontological logics underlying triage. It argues that triage, both historically and today, operates as a hybrid practice that balances utilitarian goals with deontological constraints. The article concludes by refl ecting on the continuing relevance of Larrey’s legacy for modern emergency medicine, armed confl ict, and pandemic response.
Dr Werner Volkmar Beck was born on the 19th of May, 1910 in Elbe as a son of the Evangelical Lutheran pastor – Oskar. In 1940–1944 he was the director of the State Institute of Forensic Medicine in Krakow and since 1942 – the director of the State Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminology in Krakow. While his career he abused the Polish medical staff. He was a chronic alcoholic. In the mortuary he arranged a drinks buffet. He did some pseudomedical experiments with the corpses. He had ashtrays from anatomised skulls and pendants from shoulder blades made. He took part in the exhumation of the Polish offi cers murdered by Soviets in Katyn in 1940. He gave evidence in 1952 heard by Select Committee to Investigate and Study the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre (The American Madden Committee). According to the archival records, he also took part in the liquidation of the Psychiatric Hospital in Kobierzyn. Dr Werner left Krakow on the 17/18th of January, 1945. On the 25th of March, 1946 the professor Jan Olbrycht sent a letter to Dr Mieczysław Szerer – the representative of the Government of the International Committee of War Affairs in London in order to capture wanted Werner Beck. In spite of the steps taken, he was never arrested or convicted. On the 28th of October, 1971 the District Commission to Investigate the Nazi Crimes in Krakow started the investigation into the criminal career of dr Werner Beck, which was dismissed on the grounds of the amnesty from the 27th of April, 1956.
This article presents a preliminary analysis of the activities of paediatricians in the Warsaw ghetto between 1940 and 1943. The starting point is the fi nding that in the fi rst year of the war, there were about one hundred Jewish paediatricians in Warsaw, many of whom continued to practise medicine there after the creation of the closed district. The aim of the text is primarily to identify the available source base and outline the main areas of activity of this professional group, rather than to provide a complete reconstruction of the phenomenon. The source material consists of materials from the Ringelblum Archive, documents from aid institutions – the Jewish Social Self-Help Organisation, the Central Offi ce for the Care of Orphans and Abandoned Children (Centos) and the Joint – as well as personal sources: diaries, memoirs and post-war eyewitness accounts. The analysis shows that the activities of paediatricians in the ghetto were varied. Some doctors ran private practices, while others worked in care and treatment institutions, such as outpatient clinics, mother and child care stations, orphanages and children’s homes. The Bersohn and Bauman Hospital, the main paediatric facility in the ghetto, played a special role. Doctors were also involved in teaching and research on the effects of malnutrition, including the clinical picture of starvation in children. However, the actual treatment options were severely limited by a shortage of medicines, poor sanitary conditions and widespread malnutrition among the population. As a result, paediatric practice often took on a primarily caring and palliative character.
Founded in 1198 by Pope Innocent III, the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Rome is the most famous and largest charitable institution in Europe, run by the Order of Canons Regular of the Holy Spirit (known as the Spirits). From the beginning, it housed two separate but integrally linked institutions with different functions: a shelter for abandoned children (brefotrophium) and a proper hospital for the sick – the infi rmary. Both became the subject of research by the author of the article, who published two separate monographs on them: Abandoned Children at the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Rome in the 18th Century (1998) and The Infi rmary of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Rome in the 17th and 18th Centuries (2023).This text attempts to answer the question of whether, and to what extent, the formally autonomous parts of the Holy Spirit Hospital cooperated with each other, and what were the interconnections between them? The answers will be considered from two perspectives: the mutual relations and cooperation between the residents and staff of the two hospital factions. It will be crucial to clarify the extent to which these two major components of this monumental institution were interdependent, mutually benefi cial, and complementary in their daily needs, and which elements of hospital operations were common to both, and which were entirely distinct.
