New Books Network Matthew P. Romaniello, "Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Apr 11, 2026
Matthew P. Romaniello, historian of Russian imperial history and medicine, explores 18th-century naturalists and physicians who mapped Russia’s people, climate, and health. He discusses humoral medicine as ethnography, transnational medical networks, scurvy and variolation campaigns, travel writing biases, and how climate shaped imperial knowledge and reputation.
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Humoral Medicine Framed Ethnography In Russia
- 18th-century naturalists used humoral medicine as a framework that turned ethnographic descriptions into medical portraits linking climate, diet, and temperament.
- Matthew P. Romaniello shows travellers predicted body types (phlegmatic, melancholic) from climate and explained exceptions (violence, facial hair) by diet or habits like smoking.
Leiden Training Shaped Russia's Medical Elite
- Russia's medical networks favored Leiden-style training over French schools, shaping who was recruited and which scientific methods dominated in the empire.
- Romaniello traces Peter the Great's Dutch ties and how Leiden-trained physicians built hiring pipelines, marginalizing French approaches like Buffon's.
Russian Cases Were Crucial To Solving Scurvy
- Russian case reports of land scurvy helped James Lind conclude sea and land scurvy were the same disease, informing British naval medicine.
- Romaniello documents how Russian physicians' reports from Riga, Astrakhan, and St. Petersburg circulated to European medical networks and influenced Lind's Treatise of Scurvy.
