Around 1900 Polish doctors and scientists were on the move.Footnote 1 They travelled to study, to do research or to participate in international health politics: Poland's ‘first bacteriologist’ Odo Bujwid, born in 1857, studied in Warsaw, Berlin and Paris, pursued a career in the Polish Kingdom and in 1893 took the chair of hygiene in Cracow.Footnote 2 The generation of Polish physicians born in the 1880s and 1890s, reaching the peak of their careers in the interwar period, proved equally mobile. Bujwid's student Ludwik Rajchman studied and worked in Cracow, Paris and London and later became the director of the League of Nations Health Organisation in Geneva.Footnote 3 His cousin, the bacteriologist, serologist and immunologist Ludwik Hirszfeld studied in Würzburg and Berlin, worked in Heidelberg and Zurich and returned to his hometown Warsaw in 1919.Footnote 4 The doctor and epidemiologist Stanisława Adamowicz studied in St. Petersburg before taking a job in Warsaw after the First World War.Footnote 5 Her colleague Marcin Kacprzak pursued his medical studies in Paris and Kharkov, worked in Warsaw during the interwar period and spent extensive study visits in the United States.Footnote 6 The bacteriologist Helena Sparrow attended university in Kiev, took a position in Warsaw in 1920 and later settled at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis.Footnote 7
The article will explore the different forms of international scientific travel and exchange practised by these six specialists in bacteriology and epidemiology. It argues that we can observe transnational forms of border-crossing scientific activities through Odo Bujwid's travels at the end of the nineteenth century. The younger generation, living in a re-established Polish state after 1918 and working for Polish state institutions, conceived of international scientific exchange in ways which can be described as ‘Olympic Internationalism’.
When our six mobile doctors received their education there was no Poland on the maps of Europe. At the end of the eighteenth century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned between Prussia, Habsburg and the Tsarist Empire. All six doctors grew up as citizens of the multi-ethnic Tsarist Empire, and their mobility within and beyond this Empire makes calling them ‘Polish’ something to be explained. If a Polish state had not been reborn in 1918 some of them might not have entered the history of science and medicine as ‘Polish’ at all. Ludwik Hirszfeld was at the start of a career in Zurich and Ludwik Rajchman was well settled in London when Poland reappeared on the maps of Europe as a result of the First World War.Footnote 8
The question of what we can call Poland and Polish in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has recently been termed ‘one of the most important but most challenging aspects of Polish history’.Footnote 9 Mobility, hybridity and a multiplicity of loyalties and identifications must actually be regarded as one of its central characteristics. Between 1795 and 1918 the people of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (where the Polish nation was thought to include the nobility only) belonged to three multi-ethnic states or empires. The languages spoken were not only Polish but also Lithuanian, Ukranian, Belorussian, Yiddish, German and Russian, there was administrative staff coming in from the partition powers and there were not only Catholics but also Jews as well as Greek- and Russian-Orthodox. How the Polish nation would find a place in such a diverse context was an open question, and Polish nation-building took different routes in excluding and including varying social, language or religious groups. These did not necessarily follow Polish nationalist calls but rather experienced individual complicated processes of nation-building.Footnote 10 Naming the actors of this article's story ‘Polish’ serves, first of all, to place them within a hybrid historical sphere which can only be engaged with if ‘we place diversity front-and-center’.Footnote 11 It does not aim to assign them a clear-cut national identity.
At the same time, the Polish nation did play a role in all of these mobile and border-crossing scientific lives. Exactly what role it played and how the malleable ideas about a Polish nation and state affected the practices and ideas of international scientific exchange amongst Polish physicians and scientists is the topic of this article. The terms ‘transnationalism’ and ‘Olympic Internationalism’ try to encompass the different approaches towards Polish nation and state which can be observed within the international practices of the six scientists mentioned.
In my analysis of international scientific exchange I understand the term ‘transnationalism’ in a twofold sense. On the one hand, it describes a historiographical perspective which strictly historicises the category of the nation. If we look at history from this angle we follow our actors on their way through the world without presuming any sort of given national allegiance.Footnote 12 If and how the category of the nation matters to these historical actors remains open. They might have been indifferent towards the nationalFootnote 13 or they might have contributed to the entanglement and hybridisation of national spheres.Footnote 14 However, this transnational approach to our historical actors does not preclude the category of the nation turning out to be of great importance to their story or experiences of international exchange reinforcing ideas of national belonging.Footnote 15
On the other hand, I use the term transnationalism to give a qualitative characterisation of international exchange. It describes border-crossing entanglements during which the nation did not play a prominent role. When I analyse Odo Bujwid's international scientific activities I apply the term transnationalism to present ‘links and flows’ in medical sciences which did not find their focal point in the nation.Footnote 16 Bujwid's practices and ideas of international exchange transcended nationalised categories in a manifold sense and therefore challenge our conception of international exchange as inter-national.
When we look at the practices of the interwar generation of bacteriologists and epidemiologists we find that the nation and especially the Polish state did matter greatly to them. The concept of ‘Olympic Internationalism’ – a term coined by Geert Somsen – seems to be a suitable description of their forms of international exchange. Olympic Internationalism is truly inter-national. It does not transcend national boundaries in any way. Rather, this form of border-crossing communication aspires to stabilise and strengthen nation and state by way of international comparison. International encounters serve, like during the Olympics, as a forum in which nations can be celebrated.Footnote 17
The article discusses two fields of medical knowledge which dealt with epidemics: bacteriology and epidemiology. Bacteriology focused on the control and manipulation of pathogenic microorganisms in the laboratory. By contrast, epidemiology approached epidemics not from the level of the aetiological agent but from a population perspective. It was interested in the spread, development and mortality of an epidemic. Its core instrument was statistics.Footnote 18 The first part of the paper focuses on Odo Bujwid's transnational bacteriology. The second part will shed light on actors working in the interwar period not only in bacteriology but also in the field of epidemiology. Let us start by following Odo Bujwid on his scientific itinerary in order to find out if, when and how the nation mattered to his ideas and practices of international scientific exchange.
Scientific Mobility as Transnationalism
When Odo Bujwid was a medical student at Warsaw's Tsarist University a new field of medical knowledge celebrated successes in Paris and Berlin. In 1881 Louis Pasteur had demonstrated the effects of a vaccine against the animal disease anthrax. His outdoor experiment at a farm in Pouilly-le-Fort received media coverage all over the world and made Pasteur a famous man. A year later Robert Koch presented the bacillus which caused tuberculosis to colleagues in Berlin and achieved similar fame and glory. Bacteriology was a rising star in modern scientific medicine. The idea that invisible pathogenic microbes cause infectious disease and that bacteriologists were those who could tackle them in their laboratories stabilised during the 1880s and transformed concepts of body, health and disease.Footnote 19
This news was heard in the Polish Kingdom as well. Reading German, French and British medical journals was common practice at Warsaw University.Footnote 20 Odo Bujwid might have done so too, or he might have learned about the new field of bacteriology from his histology teacher Henryk Hoyer, who had repeated the isolation of the tubercle bacillus in his own laboratory.Footnote 21 Bujwid himself was fascinated by microscopy and his examinations of lung secretions gained him the gold medal in a student paper competition.Footnote 22 This won him the support of Tytus Chałubiński, professor emeritus of internal medicine at Warsaw University and co-founder of the Mianowski Foundation, which provided grants for the advancement of Polish scientists. After Robert Koch began offering official bacteriology courses in Berlin in 1885 Chałubiński secured Bujwid the necessary funding to attend. When Bujwid left for Berlin he was in his seventh year at medical school and twenty-seven years old.Footnote 23
A Varsovian Learning Bacteriology between Berlin and Paris
During Koch's two-month course Bujwid was introduced to the specific Kochian style of bacteriology.Footnote 24 It was characterised by a strong focus on aetiological questions, a linear and antagonistic model of disease causation and the idea of stable bacterial species. That a specific and invariable sort of microbe caused one specific disease (independent of environmental factors or individual constitution) was a basic assumption of Kochian bacteriology.Footnote 25 In practice, this style meant a great emphasis on diagnostic work in the laboratory. Bedside medicine and treating patients did not feature on Koch's list of priorities.
The laboratory techniques dearest to Koch and paradigmatic of his style were the solid growth medium and the production of pure cultures. The idea of stable bacterial species and the linear model of disease causation were constituted and upheld by these techniques. Whereas other bacteriologists used liquid broth to make bacteria grow, Koch added gelatine or agar-agar to make the growth medium solid. This solidity allowed him to cultivate individual bacterial colonies in a fixed spot and thus made it possible to neatly separate the mixture of bacteria contained in infected material into well-defined species.Footnote 26 Pure cultures became the defining visual representation of bacteria and, once injected into a laboratory animal, put a linear and monocausal model of disease causation into practice.Footnote 27 Accordingly, Bujwid and his fellow students were taught exactly these techniques. They were introduced to the bacteriologist's instruments and laboratory equipment, they learned how to produce culture medium from beef, gelatine and agar-agar, they bred pure cultures of the anthrax bacillus, they infected mice with it, they coloured specimen and they got acquainted with the shapes of pathogens under the microscope.Footnote 28
When Bujwid returned home to Warsaw he was thus able to perform bacteriological diagnostics. Koch had taught him nothing about treating sick patients. Nevertheless, the Mianowski Foundation consented to give him a further grant to furnish his own laboratory. He accommodated it in the kitchen of his private apartment on Wilcza Street in Warsaw. Above his door he proudly hung a sign reading ‘Bacteriological Laboratory’ (Pracownia bakteriologiczna). Some colleagues were eager to learn the new techniques from him and Bujwid started a series of lectures in his small kitchen lab.Footnote 29
The bacteriological style Bujwid had studied in Berlin was not uncontested, however. In Paris Louis Pasteur practised quite a different form of bacteriology. His contributed much more to medical treatment than Koch's. Pasteur did not care much about pure cultures and solid growth medium. Neither was he convinced of the stability of microorganisms' qualities. Most relevant to his work was the idea of variation in bacterial virulence.Footnote 30 By exposing bacteria to heat, oxygen or acids Pasteur experimentally reduced their pathogenic qualities. This was his key technology in producing vaccines.Footnote 31
Pasteur and Koch stood in fierce opposition to each other. While Pasteur ignored Koch's solid culture medium, Koch dismissed Pasteur's vaccination techniques.Footnote 32 Without breeding bacteria in pure culture, Koch told the students of his bacteriology course in Berlin, the method of anthrax vaccination was totally ‘unscientific’.Footnote 33 Nor did the dispute end with scientific questions. The competition between Pasteur and Koch was perceived to be a national one as well. Koch's Bakteriologie was thought to be German and Pasteur's microbiologie French.Footnote 34
The contradiction of the two nationalised thought styles would soon play a role in Bujwid's international scientific life as well. In October 1885, when he had just returned home from producing pure cultures with Koch, news came from Paris that Pasteur had succeeded in vaccinating humans for the first time. He had protected a young boy from Alsace-Lorraine from an infection with rabies.Footnote 35 Bujwid received the message with scepticism. Koch had taught him better. But Bujwid's mentor Chałubiński took the issue more seriously. He approached Bujwid and asked him if he did not want to check for himself whether Pasteur's work was any good. He managed to persuade the young doctor and Bujwid left for his next study trip. Funded by the Mianowski Foundation for the second time, in April 1886 Bujwid boarded the train again – this time to Paris.Footnote 36
When he arrived at Pasteur's laboratory he was immediately drawn into the ongoing French-German bacteriological conflict. Pasteur had agreed to receive him in his laboratory. But when Bujwid actually stood in front of him he did not give him a very warm welcome. He greeted him with the question: ‘You come from Koch. What does he say about my method? Does he speak with malevolence?’ In his memoirs Bujwid recalls that this put him in quite a desperate situation. What was he to answer? Was he to admit that Koch had judged Pasteur's vaccine as ‘unscientific’? He went for a compromise and reported that Koch had made only slightly reluctant comments about Pasteur's achievement.Footnote 37 This answer did not satisfy the French microbiologist, however, and he sent Bujwid away.Footnote 38
Somehow, Bujwid managed to stay anyway. He was allowed to assist in laboratory proceedings and helped to extract the spinal marrow of a rabbit which was used to produce the rabies vaccine. Doing so he was caught in a second French-German bacteriological contradiction right away. He sterilised a knife using a method ‘from (d'après) Koch’. Then, he asked the laboratory assistant if he could cut a small piece of the spinal marrow so he could grow rabies microbes in pure culture on solid culture medium. Pasteur was outraged. Koch's prime method, the solid culture medium, in his laboratory! He exclaimed: ‘You, you Germans, you come here to criticise us, to correct our methods’.Footnote 39
In using Kochian techniques Bujwid had been clearly identified as a (bacteriological) German. Despite the fact that he was a Russian citizen and had grown up in Warsaw, pure culture made him German and thus an enemy to Pasteur. If he wanted to stay in Paris Bujwid had to switch sides. In his memoirs Bujwid recalls quite a dramatic scene of coming to a decision. In the end he decided to abandon his Kochian roots and become a ‘Pasteurian’ instead. He told Pasteur that he had full trust in his vaccination technique and that he regarded it specific, safe and effective – exactly what Koch and other critics thought it was not.Footnote 40 To prove his new allegiance he was even willing to submit to a rabies vaccination himself.Footnote 41 Only after this enactment of scientific loyalty and the renouncement of Koch was Bujwid allowed to stay in Pasteur's lab officially and to study the production and application of rabies vaccine for two months.Footnote 42
Pasteurian Bacteriology, Polish Hygienists and the Tsarist Administration
When Bujwid returned home to Warsaw this time, he did not only bring diagnostic bacteriological know-how but also applicable knowledge that helped to treat patients. After having survived his first international challenge in his border-crossing scientific life the next one would follow right away. The newly baptised Pasteurian now had to stabilise his bacteriological ideas and practices within the medical community of the Polish Kingdom. This community belonged to and was governed by the Tsarist state, but it was also part of a highly nationalised Polish hygiene movement. Scientific, national and imperial loyalties did not go hand in hand, and Bujwid would have to navigate through this heterogeneous space. Pasteurian bacteriology proved to be a good tool with which to do so. It connected several actors within the field of medicine in the Kingdom and it boosted Bujwid's career.
Back home in Ulica Wilcza Bujwid extended his kitchen laboratory to his basement where he accommodated the rabies infected rabbits necessary to produce the vaccine (it was made from their spinal marrow). His new wife was recruited as an unpaid but very skilful laboratory assistant. Kazimiera Klimontowicz-Bujwidowa was soon to become a leading figure in the women's movement in Cracow.Footnote 43 But in 1886 in Warsaw she enabled her husband to begin his own vaccine production.Footnote 44 Doctors from all over the Kingdom started sending their patients to the young couple to be vaccinated, and Bujwid renamed his laboratory ‘Pasteur Institute’ (Zakład Pasteurowski). Half a year later he proudly presented extensive statistics about the 104 patients treated so far. All of them had been saved after being badly bitten by rabid dogs, cats or horses.Footnote 45 His success was recognised by the Warsaw Medical Society, which voted Bujwid the winner of a competition for rabies research and awarded him 400 roubles.Footnote 46
But it was not only doctors and patients who were interested in his work. The Tsarist government and Warsaw's hygiene movement also both approved of his vaccination technique. The Tsarist administration became involved when the question arose of where Bujwid could house those of his patients who came to Warsaw from other towns and villages across the country. Public health matters had been taken from the hands of Polish self-administration – like practically everything else – in the years following the January Uprising of 1863.Footnote 47 The management of Warsaw hospitals had moved from a Polish and medically trained staff to Russian bureaucrats in the City Council of Public Welfare (Rada miejska dobroczynności publicznej). It now lay under the direct supervision of the Ministry of the Interior in St. Petersburg.Footnote 48 This structure is usually blamed for slowing down progress in the Kingdom’s medical care.Footnote 49 However, the City Council proved quite cooperative with regard to Bujwid's Pasteurian bacteriology. It provided him with further funding for his extended laboratory and it ensured that part of Warsaw's Wola Hospital was transformed into a rabies ward where Bujwid could accommodate his patients. Furthermore, it agreed to cover the costs of 15 roubles for patients without means.Footnote 50
Tsarist government representatives applauded Bujwid's vaccination work. The General Governor and his family were fascinated by rabies vaccination when they visited Bujwid's pavilion during the Warsaw Hygiene Exhibition in 1887,Footnote 51 and the Tsar's Cousin, Count Oldenburg, took a tour of Bujwid's ‘Pasteur Institute’ when he came by Warsaw.Footnote 52
That Warsaw became home to a Hygiene Exhibition in 1887 and that Bujwid was given a venue in which to present his work was the result of the activities of the Warsaw hygiene movement, bourgeois philanthropists who pressured for public health politics in Warsaw during the last third of the century. Warsaw's wealthy elite – of Catholic and Jewish faith alike – financed hospitals, sanatoria, public gardens, milk stations and new apartment blocks.Footnote 53 From 1885 onwards a public health journal appeared called Health (Zdrowie), but a decade before that the movement had successfully pressured for the introduction of water filters and a canalisation system in Warsaw.Footnote 54
These activities were closely linked to a new form of Polish nationalism which took root in Warsaw after the failure of the January Uprising. The so-called Warsaw positivists called for new ways of preserving the Polish nation. Instead of a romanticised battle leading to martyrdom Warsaw positivists favoured a programme of gradual economic and scientific modernisation. Polish society was to work on itself and strive towards progress and civilisation. Yet, modernisation work was to take place in small steps. Warsaw positivists declined revolutionary action and instead advocated the idea of ‘organic work’. Only this way could a strong Polish nation be formed and – one day – run its own state.Footnote 55 Health was an important part of this project and doctors were expected to contribute their share to modernisation work. Professional medical care and good health became important markers for the grade of civilisation the Polish nation had achieved.
This positivist connection of health, modernity and Polish nationhood made the hygiene movement a national endeavour. Footnote 56 At the same time public health questions were an arena of cooperation between the Polish elite and Tsarist administration in Warsaw. Positivists were not as pro-Russian as the movement of the ‘reconciliators’ (ugodowcy) but as they despised revolutionary fight they were open to working together with the Russian administration. Within the field of public health this partly fell on fertile soil. The Tsarist mayor of Warsaw, Sokrat Starynkevich, and his magistrate actively supported the introduction of the canalisation and sewerage system in the city, and the general governor Iosif Gurko – although known as being explicitly anti-Polish – let philanthropic activities in the field of public health happen. Nevertheless, the close connection of hygienic modernisation and Polish nationalism made the Russian administration draw a clear line around these activities. References to the Polish character and specificity of certain endeavours were usually prohibited, as was the formation of official associations. As a result, it was not until 1898 that the establishment of a hygiene association was finally allowed. It had to call itself ‘Warsaw Society of Hygiene’ (Warszawskie Towarzystwo Hygieniczne) The term ‘Polish’ remained impossible.Footnote 57
With regard to rabies vaccinations, however, Tsarist and Polish hygienists' interests went hand in hand, which Bujwid's presence at the hygiene exhibition shows. The organisers had granted him his own pavilion in which to present his work and permitted him to give public lectures, which were – as Bujwid recalls in his memoirs – always crowded.Footnote 58 Thus, Pasteurian bacteriology had allowed Bujwid to connect to medical, Tsarist and national hygienists circles in Warsaw; this proved to be a successful mixture.
French, German or Polish Bacteriology?
Bujwid maintained an open mind to the various possible ‘allies’ for the promotion of his work throughout the 1880s and 1890s. He did not exclusively commit his bacteriology to either the Polish national cause or the Tsarist Empire. What is more, it also turned out that he did not commit his bacteriological style to either the ‘French’ or the ‘German’ side.
When we look at his writing we find that Bujwid never explicitly linked bacteriology to the hygiene movement, questions of public health or ideas of modernity. There was no single line in his papers in which he alluded to the general importance of bacteriology to public health. Beyond his presence at the hygiene exhibition he certainly did not press the scientific community to understand that his knowledge could contribute to the modernisation of the Polish nation. Bujwid did not actively transform his bacteriology into a field of specifically Polish national importance.
That Bujwid did not participate in the positivist endeavour of connecting science and nation-building also becomes clear in various parts of his memoirs. They present him as a scientist beyond national thinking. Such autobiographical writing has of course to be treated carefully. Regardless, the absence of a link between bacteriology and Polish national causes seems rather striking if we consider that Bujwid wrote his memoirs in the interwar period when there was no more Russian censorship and praising the Polish nation was very fashionable.
Bujwid remembers that when he was elected student member of the interdepartmental deputation of the Tsarist University – a secret group, as all forms of societies were usually forbidden, and a meeting ground for nationally active students in Warsaw – he spent little time on it. He thought his studies much more important: ‘I remember only little of these activities, especially because I was quickly absorbed by my scientific work. . . .’Footnote 59 When he attended the meetings he tried to be as apolitical as possible and to concentrate on the scientific questions only: ‘[During our sessions] you could already observe the emergence of political parties: socialists and nationalists. I tried to remain impartial. I was mostly concerned about reciprocal help in scientific work and in the material support of students.’Footnote 60
That Polish nation- and state-building had no priority in Bujwid's thinking about the sciences is further illustrated in his remembrances of his life in Habsburg ruled Galicia. In 1893 Bujwid had received the chair of hygiene at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and he and his family moved to the capital of the Austrian partition. In the liberal atmosphere of Galicia, where Vienna had allowed an autonomous Polish government, as well as a Polish-speaking administration and education, Bujwid's wife Kazimiera became very active in Cracovian political and social life. She made the Bujwids' home a meeting ground for socialist and feminist activists, and she also became involved in the Polish national movement. Odo had completely different things on his mind: ‘back then, I had the goal to introduce and popularise a new science in Poland – bacteriology. Dreams of independence were far away for me. I was enchanted by Austria, which granted us some freedom. They permitted Polish schools and universities; we could speak Polish but we had to think in Austrian. How was I to expect that which happened thanks to the Great War?’Footnote 61 So even when looking back at his life from the highly nationalised context of the Second Polish Republic in 1935 – that is when this entry is from – Bujwid did not connect bacteriology to Polish state- and nation-building. There were people working for Polish independence on the one hand and there was him popularising bacteriology on the other. He did not see a link between the two.
The entanglement of bacteriology, modernity and Polish nationalism was apparently not promising enough to make it compelling as an exclusive strategy. Imperial structures had a lot to offer to Bujwid as well. So, beyond presenting his work at the hygiene exhibition, in 1890 he accepted the invitation of Count Oldenburg to work for a period in St. Petersburg, where Oldenburg had founded an institute for rabies research in 1885.Footnote 62 In 1891 the Tsarist administration named Bujwid head of the bacteriological station of Odessa where he spent a year.Footnote 63 In 1893 Bujwid was ready to move into yet another Polish national and imperial context when he accepted the chair of hygiene at Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
The reluctance towards a clear-cut political categorisation of his work can be found also in Bujwid's bacteriological style. While in Paris Bujwid had claimed his allegiance to ‘French’ bacteriology, and it was the Pasteurian vaccination technique which made his work attractive to the medical, imperial and national actors in the field of public health. But if we take a closer look at Bujwid's work after 1886 we find that he did not totally abandon his bacteriological Germanness. First of all, he continued to use the solid culture medium if it responded to his needs. Pure cultures made up a considerable part of Bujwid's first book, Five Lectures about Bacteria, published in 1887. Here, he praised Koch for his contributions to the advancement of bacteriology and scrupulously explained how to produce culture medium from agar-agar or gelatine.Footnote 64 When cholera broke out in the Polish Kingdom in 1892 Bujwid sent a sample of a pure culture he had isolated to Koch and asked him to confirm the identity of the microbe with Koch's Vibrio cholerae.Footnote 65 Bujwid also reported about several visits to Koch in Berlin after he had stayed with Pasteur. They discussed the rabies vaccine and the newest techniques in microphotographyFootnote 66 – a technique used to take pictures of pure cultures that served as one of Koch's prime tools to create evidence.Footnote 67 Thus, Bujwid was quite far from being a pure Pasteurian. Like many others amongst Koch's followers he simply became less rigid and combined what he had learned in Berlin with Pasteurian knowledge.Footnote 68 He made this very explicit in a second book, published in 1890. In Bujwid's opinion Koch's solid culture medium had brought greater exactitude to bacteriological work. Making the national identity of this bacteriological style clear once more, Bujwid stated: ‘this exactitude in research into the causes of disease constitutes the core and the greatest merit of the German scholars’. With regard to the ‘French’ style he continued: ‘the French school with Pasteur at his head is inferior in the field of etiological research. But it is superior with regard to the practical application of bacteriology in the field of prevention and therapy.’ He explained to his readers that the two schools stood in fierce opposition to each other. He himself, however, had chosen not to struggle but to conciliate: ‘knowing both schools, the German and the French one, we will try to unite them both into one. We will try to consider both in equal parts as we had the chance to approve of both of them in the laboratories of Koch and Pasteur and in our own in Warsaw.’Footnote 69 Bujwid had decided to simply take what he needed: diagnostic techniques from Koch and knowledge applicable to medical treatment from Pasteur. He remained neither a bacteriological German nor a microbiological Frenchmen but rather developed the combined bacteriology that suited him most. Bujwid had thus dissolved the strict line between two highly nationalised bacteriological thought styles.
To produce such a mixture of medical knowledge from all over the world was not uncommon practice in the Polish Kingdom. The histologist Henryk Hoyer, Bujwid's professor at medical school, even called it a specific quality of ‘Polish’ medicine. Considering that capacities for original research were limited in the Russian partition itself, he claimed that Polish scientific merit lay mostly with receiving and applying progressive medicine from all over the world. This, he claimed, resulted in the coexistence and combination of most different schools.Footnote 70 Hoyer placed the transnational hybridisation of medical knowledge back into a national box. To him, transferring and combining knowledge from different national contexts was specifically ‘Polish’. Odo Bujwid acted differently. The denomination ‘Polish’ does not come up in his characterisation of his combinatory bacteriological work. As he did not see a close link between bacteriology and Polish state- and nation-building, naming his own work specifically Polish apparently made no sense to Bujwid.
He and his bacteriology can therefore be regarded as belonging to the transnational ‘people, ideas, products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, or in-between polities and societies’.Footnote 71 Bujwid operated across national entities, not only in-between them, when he transformed ‘German’ and ‘French’ bacteriology by combining them in a specific way. He did not accept the mutual exclusivity of the two nationalised thought styles but melted them together into a useful mixture. This new form of bacteriological thinking and doing did not go through the Polish nation, however. It remained beyond national categorisation and Bujwid neither connected it exclusively to Polish state- and nation-building, nor solely to the causes of the empire. This hybridity and openness of his bacteriology thus allowed for a broad range of possible supporters.
Bujwid's reticence to connect science and nation might be considered atypical amongst the late nineteenth-century Polish speaking scientific community and intellectual elite. Bujwid did not go with the positivist trend and his case contradicts the idea of a nationalisation of scientific knowledge in Central Eastern Europe during this period.Footnote 72 However, the question of how exactly the thousands of travelling Polish-speaking students and scholars of the nineteenth century dealt with their transnational experiences on the one hand and national loyalties on the other remains an open field of research.Footnote 73 First results hint at a stronger connection of Polish nationalism and scientific knowledge than we can observe with Odo Bujwid but also emphasise a simultaneousness of nationalism and transnationalism amongst individual scientists.Footnote 74 Bujwid's case shows that scientific nationalism was no necessity in the late nineteenth-century Polish partitions. Rather, ignoring the Polish nation in scientific work remained sayable and doable. Bujwid's reluctance toward forming an exclusive link between bacteriology and Polish nationalism did not pass onto his student generation, however. The role of the nation in bacteriological and epidemiological work would change considerably with the emergence of the Second Polish Republic.
Scientific Exchange as Olympic Internationalism
In contrast to Odo Bujwid, bacteriologists and epidemiologists in interwar Poland connected their research activities explicitly to the Polish nation and state. Bacteriology, epidemiology and the Polish nation state became very closely entangled after 1918. Bacteriologists did not work in private kitchen laboratories any longer and public health matters did not remain in the realms of bourgeois philanthropists. Now, bacteriologists were hired by state institutions and served as experts for the Polish public health administration.Footnote 75 The remainder of this article will analyse new forms of international scientific exchange with bacteriology, epidemiology and the Polish nation state forming a close alliance in the interwar period.
Typhus, Poland and International Health Politics
The new Polish state was born into a health crisis. In 1919 and 1920 Russia and the eastern parts of Poland were severely struck by a typhus epidemic which caused national and international alarm. The spread of the epidemic was connected to the advancing Red Army which strove to bring socialism to Germany. In 1919 it stood in western Ukraine and thus not far from the eastern Polish border. Bolshevism had been described using threatening medical metaphors in different national contexts. Probably best known is Churchill's depiction of bolshevism as ‘disease’, ‘pestilence’ or ‘bacillus’.Footnote 76 However, the connection of military and epidemic threat was made strongest in Poland itself. It became particularly powerful within the context of the Polish-Soviet war (1919–1921),Footnote 77 which seriously threatened the just regained Polish independence. In Polish discourse the military defence of the state against the Red Army and the medical defence against typhus became closely intertwined. Fighting epidemics therefore emerged as a matter of concern not only to the well-being of Polish citizens but also to the stability of the young Polish nation state.
Warsaw hastened to establish a state administration in public health. Already in April 1918 a Ministry of Public Health was formed which was the first of its kind on European soil.Footnote 78 A Central State Epidemiological Institute, later State Institute of Hygiene (Państwowy Zakład Higieny, PZH), was established in November 1918. It performed bacteriological diagnostics and produced vaccines and sera.Footnote 79 Special commissions for fighting typhus were formed and the project of building up public health administration on the local and district level was begun.Footnote 80
The new institutions needed personnel and the Warsaw government called for ‘Polish’ scientists abroad to come home and help build a modern nation state. Many responded to this call.Footnote 81 Among them were Ludwik Rajchman, who came to Warsaw from London, and Ludwik Hirszfeld, who arrived in the Polish capital from the Serbian front in Salonica. Stanisława Adamowicz, Marcin Kacprzak and Helena Sparrow were swept to Warsaw from Russia and the western provinces of the Tsarist Empire by the events of the Russian Revolution. Until then, these physicians and scientists had pursued their careers in structures which were completely unrelated to a Polish nation and state. Except for Rajchman none of them had studied at a Polish-language university and they had worked either in the Russian health care system or – in the case of Rajchman and Hirszfeld – in scientific institutions in France, England, Germany and Switzerland. I cannot reconstruct how they conceived of the relation between their scientific knowledge and Polish nation- and state-building in the pre-1918 period. However, the fact that Warsaw was their destination after the First World War shows that they did have some sense of belonging to the Polish nation. Stanisława Adamowicz had even belonged to several associations of Polish students when she studied medicine in St. Petersburg. Yet, the question of whether she and her later colleagues Helena Sparrow and Marcin Kacprzak, who both held positions in Russian medical structures until 1920/21, would have come to the capital of the new Polish state if it had not been for the Russian Revolution must remain unanswered.Footnote 82
Ludwik Rajchman and Ludwik Hirszfeld felt no political or economic pressure in their countries of residence which would have forced them to come to Warsaw. They were well established in their respective positions in London and Zurich. The Varsovian Ludwik Rajchman had once studied in Cracow and studied bacteriology with Odo Bujwid. He later had to emigrate from the Polish Kingdom because he was persecuted for his political engagement with the socialists. He had gone to Paris to follow the bacteriology course (cours de microbiologie) at the Pasteur Institute and took a position at the Royal Institute of Public Health in London in 1911.Footnote 83 Rajchman's cousin, Ludwik Hirszfeld, had started a successful scientific career working on blood groups in Heidelberg and later at the Institute of Hygiene at Zurich University.Footnote 84 For them to leave their careers behind they must have been convinced that they had something interesting to offer to the new state. In return, Poland provided them with attractive jobs: Ludwik Rajchman was hired by the Polish Ministry of Public Health and became the founding director of the State Institute of Hygiene. He then persuaded Ludwik Hirszfeld to set up a serological institute within the confines of the PZH and later hired Adamowicz, Sparrow and Kacprzak.
In addition to these international ‘Polish’ professionals the typhus epidemic brought ‘foreign’ experts to the country. The Bolshevist-typhus narrative had alarmed numerous governments as well as national and international humanitarian organisations. As a result, the Lister Institute delegated a team to Warsaw, the American Red Cross committed units to Poland, an American-Polish Typhus Relief Expedition was formed and the League of Red Cross Societies became active, as did Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee also sent help. The humanitarian and military motivations of these activities were closely intertwined.Footnote 85
The Bolshevist-typhus narrative also accelerated the formation of a new international body of public health within the League of Nations. When the League came into being with the Treaty of Versailles it immediately formed an informal health section which put the epidemic on its agenda. From this developed the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO) in 1921.Footnote 86
The emerging public health administration of the new Polish state was thus immediately drawn into the international arena, and the internationally experienced ‘Polish’ experts filled the important function of mediating between the international community and Poland.Footnote 87 Ludwik Rajchman's familiarity with Polish, British and French (scientific) culture gained him acceptance on all sides. When the League of Nations members came together in London for their first international conference on health matters in April 1920 Rajchman was one of the Polish representatives. The conference gave the typhus epidemic top priority. A typhus commission was formed and Rajchman was elected one of its members, from where he pressured for financial assistance to fight the epidemic.Footnote 88 In July 1921 Rajchman was named medical director of the League of Nations’ Health Section and was from then on head of the LNHO.Footnote 89 He moved from Warsaw to Geneva but also remained director of the PZH. Both institutions therefore became closely entangled.
The typhus epidemic had thus made public health in Poland a topic which entwined the national and the international. The double function of Rajchman as PZH and LNHO director placed the State Institute of Hygiene at a special position of this crossroad.Footnote 90 How the PZH personnel conceived of their function as state experts for bacteriological and epidemiological questions on the one hand and ideas about the international exchange of knowledge in the field of public health on the other will be discussed in the following two sections. I will first look at practices in epidemics statistics and then turn to scientific travel.
International and National Epidemics Statistics
The typhus epidemic had made it very clear to League officials in Geneva that there existed no reliable international epidemiological intelligence service. The lack of data about the health situation in Poland had actually been one of the reasons why League help had been launched only very slowly.Footnote 91 From the very beginning it had been one of the primary goals of the organisers of the LNHO to make it ‘the centre for the collection and issue of international health statistics and of arrangements for their presentation as far as possible in comparable form’.Footnote 92 In January 1923 the LNHO appointed Edgar Seydenstricker as chief statistician in order to put the international reporting system on solid ground. The League then began to regularly publish monthly and annual epidemiological reports.Footnote 93 In 1926 it added weekly reports to its epidemiological intelligence programme.Footnote 94
In Warsaw the PZH's epidemics department was responsible for providing Geneva with Polish national data. It was first headed by Stanisława Adamowicz. In 1924 she was joined by a new colleague. Marcin Kacprzak was made head of the department instead of her, and Adamowiz was degraded to a collaborator – probably due to her gender.Footnote 95
Adamowicz and Kacprzak did hard work to have Polish numbers included in Geneva statistics. First of all, they entered into a fight with Polish doctors working on the ground. District medical officers were to provide the necessary numbers for composing epidemics statistics. This position had been established by the Polish Sanitary Law of July 1919, and the supply of local epidemiological information to Warsaw was one of its core responsibilities.Footnote 96 District medical officers had to send numbers about infectious diseases to the capital on a weekly basis. When and how these numbers were to be submitted was strictly regulated. The week ended every Saturday at midnight. The district medical officer then had to note the number of reported cases on a pre-printed table and send it to Warsaw so it would arrive there on Tuesday the latest.Footnote 97 Here, it was received by Kacprzak and Adamowicz – at least in theory. In fact, district medical officers very often sent their weekly tables too late or not at all, did not fill them correctly, forgot to put the date in the top row or did not understand the Polish names of the diseases because they were Germans working in the former Prussian partition. The Ministry of the Interior, then responsible for questions of public health, sent regular reminders, complaints and warnings to the district administrations to make the medical officers do their work.Footnote 98 In November 1929 the Ministry – now with Marcin Kacprzak also heading the ministerial statistics departmentFootnote 99 – decided to rearrange the entire reporting scheme. A decree issued:
The fight against infectious diseases will produce best results only if individual cases of these diseases are reported accurately and quickly. Appropriate and effective instructions can only be issued on this basis.
What is more, the quick sending of data from the individual districts is indispensable for the Ministry of the Interior in order to reconstruct a realistic picture of the development of infectious diseases in the country, as well as with regard to the necessity to send official bulletins about the numbers of diseased and dead from infectious diseases to neighbour countries, but first of all to the Hygiene Section of the League of Nations and the Office International d'Hygiène Publique in Paris.
Therefore the Ministry of the Interior decrees the following changes to the previous regulation. . . The end of the week is transferred from Saturday midnight to Saturday 12 p.m. Weekly reports can thus be sent out on Saturday before offices close so that the Ministry of the Interior will receive the reports on Monday.Footnote 100
In order to better suit the needs of an international system of epidemiological intelligence the Ministry changed the entire national reporting system. But only a couple of lines further down we find that the reason for this was not only to make Seydenstricker's reporting machinery work better:
The Ministry of the Interior treats this topic with greatest priority. It concerns the amelioration of a system of utmost importance, and this is the system of fighting epidemic diseases. To a certain degree it also concerns the prestige of the Polish State abroad. Therefore, the regulations should be strictly followed. . . . Every violation thereof will result in disciplinary investigation.Footnote 101
Thus, in Polish eyes, putting great effort into an international system of health statistics did not only contribute to making this system work. It also had relevance to the position and image of the young Polish state on the international arena.
That the international involvement of PZH statisticians with the League's epidemiological intelligence was of great importance to the Polish nation state also becomes clear when we look at the crucial meaning epidemics statistics had to Polish state-building. The new national government had to establish its rule over a territory which was stricken by ongoing war and the tremendous damages of the First World War. It had to homogenise the different administrative traditions of three partition powers, and it had to unite a population which was as heterogeneous in a linguistic, ethnic, religious and cultural sense as it had been during the times of partition. But by now nationalisation had reached a new level on all sides, leading to military conflict, anti-Semitic pogroms and the explosive question of how to deal with ‘minorities’ within a Polish nation state.Footnote 102 What was more, a deep divide separated left and right-wing political parties in Warsaw, impeding political decision-making in the Sejm.Footnote 103 The Second Polish Republic had begun in military, political and epidemiological chaos and Warsaw wanted to produce order.
This was what the weekly reporting system was meant for. The tabled data about infectious cases transformed the unknown and very different local health situations in the country into homogeneous information about a national epidemiological situation. A visible and legible national epidemiological space was thus produced. It was this function of epidemiological statistics, the making visible and legible of a very large and distant territory, which was crucial to Warsaw, even more crucial than what was actually shown. Statistics translated the imagined Polish nation state into something real, visible in numbers and representable in maps. Only this way could it be ruled.Footnote 104
In this way the reporting morale of the district medical officers did not only affect Poland's contribution to an international epidemiological intelligence, it also affected Warsaw's capacities to rule its state. In the annual epidemiological chronicle which they produced from the weekly data, and which was published in the PZH's journal from 1926 onwards, Adamowicz and Kacprzak did not only present the prevalence of different infectious diseases in the country. They also discussed the general functioning of the reporting system. No number was presented without mentioning if it was reliable or if the reports sent in on that disease were so few that it actually said very little.Footnote 105
Kacprzak and Adamowicz explained the lack of doctors' reporting discipline by a general deficit of culture. They created a clear divide between a well-developed, civilised and therefore well reporting Polish west and a backward, uncivilised and badly reporting Polish east. In this narrative the production of proper and complete statistics became an indicator for the level of civilised and modern statehood the Polish society had achieved:
The low level of culture of the population, the insufficient number of doctors and their uneven distribution in the country as well as the negligence of doctors in reporting – those are the difficulties we have to bear in mind when organising epidemics statistics in Poland. Progress in this field can only be achieved gradually. It depends on a significant raise of the level of culture and well-being on the one hand and on the education of the masses as well as of the doctors on the other.Footnote 106
Kacprzak's and Adamowicz's concern with providing epidemiological data to Geneva was thus not only motivated by the need to warn the international community of possible epidemiological threats from its territory or by the wish to produce a synoptic map of epidemics worldwide. It was also done to show that the Polish state was working and that it was modern and civilised enough to produce statistics. Their commitment to international statistics was a resource for the further stabilisation of the young and still fragile Polish nation state. First, it was used to prove that Poland had been able to transform its territory into an epidemiological space that was visible and controllable. Second, by showing the world that the country was capable of organising a national reporting system, the state gained in international acceptance.
Scientific Travel and International Exchange
That the international was a resource for the national can be shown also with regard to the continuous study trips of Polish bacteriologists and epidemiologists and their participation in international conferences. In addition to its activities in epidemiological intelligence the LNHO had taken on the question of international standards of sera and serological reactions. Ludwik Hirszfeld became a member of the responsible committee. Among other things it tried to establish standardised procedures for serological syphilis diagnostics, which was practised in numerous ways around the world using several highly complex techniques. In order to find out which diagnostic test worked best scientists from several countries met for ‘laboratory conferences’, working on the serological reactions next to each other and trying to establish best practice.Footnote 107 Like in all the League's expert committees the collaboration was thought to be purely technical and independent of political circumstances.Footnote 108 When Ludwik Hirszfeld wrote his memoirs while hiding from the Nazis in 1943, he celebrated this idea of apolitical and non-national science during the standardisation conferences. He accused the Germans of having played ‘diplomatic representatives of national science’.Footnote 109 However, smaller nations – like Poland – had simply practiced ‘pure science’: ‘I should like to emphasise that the atmosphere prevailing among scientists belonging to small nations . . . was completely different from the tense atmosphere dominating in Germany. Evidently, theirs was a purer atmosphere. They did not twaddle about national missions. . . .’Footnote 110
Yet, if we look at his contemporary rhetoric when reporting about international standardisation works, the idea of linking science to national achievements did not seem too far away to him. Rather, he more or less subtly hinted at the inferiority of German serological techniques when he stated that the German group had constantly produced deviant results during the 1923 laboratory conference in Copenhagen. This was all the more surprising, he stated, because most of the diagnostic procedures had once been developed in Germany.Footnote 111 In Hirszfeld's eyes German sciences had obviously lost their glory during the First World War. By contrast, his ‘Polish laboratory’ had produced similar results to the English, Austrian and Belgian institutions and could thus be proud of its performance in this ‘international serological competition’, as Hirszfeld called it.Footnote 112
Whereas Hirszfeld participated in scientific meetings as an internationally recognised specialist in his field, younger PZH collaborators participated in international exchange when sent on study visits abroad. The LNHO organised a programme funded by the Rockefeller Foundation which sent Polish physicians to Western Europe or the United States to study public health. Marcin Kacprzak, for instance, had spent two years as a Rockefeller fellow at Johns Hopkins University from 1922 to 1924. On the occasion of the inauguration of a Rockefeller commemorative plaque, which was installed at PZH in 1938, he recalled his memories of this time. According to Kacprzak, candidates chosen by the Polish state for a Rockefeller grant came to the United States to learn about ‘modern public health’. When they came back they were to apply their newly acquired knowledge in Poland. In Kacprzak's eyes the fellowships had therefore greatly contributed to the development of a ‘modern lookout on public health questions’ in Poland.Footnote 113‘Thanks to the experience gained in the States, we are able to serve our country better’ – he concluded in his speech given on the occasion.Footnote 114 This was what the Rockefeller Foundation would have liked to hear. It had worked out its fellowship programme in order to contribute to the social stabilisation of the new nation states in central Europe. ‘Modern public health’ was to help pursue this goal.Footnote 115
Kacprzak and other PZH-collaboratorsFootnote 116 acted accordingly and brought their state-relevant knowledge back home after one or two years abroad. Some scientists did not. Helena Sparrow had received a Rockefeller grant, organised by the LNHO's Laboratory Exchange Programme, to study the diphtheria vaccine at the Pasteur Institutes in Lille and Paris. In Paris she met Charles Nicolle, who invited her to come to the Pasteur Institute in Tunis and work on the development of a typhus vaccine. The Rockefeller Foundation funded her first trip to Tunis as well. Yet, Sparrow was lost for the Polish cause. She returned home after her first stay in Tunisia in 1926. But in 1933 she decided to settle permanently in North Africa. She was named head of laboratories (chef de laboratoire) at the Tunisian Pasteur Institute and worked at the institute until 1960.Footnote 117
Thus, international scientific exchange that did not link to national causes can be found in the interwar period as well. However, with regard to most Polish engagement with the League of Nations Health Organisation and of international scientific travel we can observe that the internationalism practised was closely linked to national thinking.
Historians of internationalism and the League of Nations have already shown that international cooperation even on a non-governmental level was very often entangled with the national. The nation informed international exchange; at the same time international structures reinforced national categories.Footnote 118 However, it has also been claimed that in the field of technical collaboration, e.g. health or economics, forms of internationalism emerged which transcended national categorisation.Footnote 119 This cannot be confirmed for Polish participation in the League's technical work on health statistics and biological standardisation. In practising ‘Olympic Internationalism’ the PZH collaborators used international scientific exchange in order to compare and celebrate the achievements of their young nation state. In this framework nationalism and internationalism went hand in hand. International cooperation was needed in order to create arenas where comparison was possible. But this comparison served, first of all, to strengthen the Polish nation state.Footnote 120
Whereas Bujwid, living in the imperial setting of the partition times, had connected his knowledge to various national and imperial spheres, the nation state had become the most important resource for bacteriologists and epidemiologists in the interwar period. Bacteriology and epidemiology had moved into the realms of state politics and state institutions, and those working in the field had become experts in service of a government. This greatly affected concepts of international travel and exchange. Although universalism and national indifference of the sciences were praised by researchers like Ludwik Hirszfeld, practices of internationalism became closely intertwined with Polish state- and nation-building. For most of the historical actors of the interwar period described in this article international scientific exchange did not work without making reference to the Polish nation and state any longer.
