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Social History of Medicine 1990 3(3):405-435; doi:10.1093/shm/3.3.405
© 1990 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
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The Limits of Government Patronage of Sciences: Social Hygiene and the Soviet State, 1920–1930

SUSAN GROSS SOLOMON*

*Department of Political Science, University of Toronto 100 St. Toronto, Canada M5S 1A1

SUMMARY In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, teaching and research in Soviet public health was fundamentally changed by the introduction of a new specialty—social hygiene-which bore some resemblance both to pre-revolutionary Russian community medicine and to German soziale medizin of the early twentieth century. Within a short period of time, Soviet social hygiene was established both as a discipline in the medical schools and as a research field in specialized government institutes and research centres. In these settings, with the patronage of the Commissariat of Public Health of the RSFSR social hygiene flourished between 1922 and 1930. This paper examines the relationship between Soviet social hygiene and this Commissariat as a case of the contribution of government to science. The paper asks not only what government did, but what it did not do for science. Whereas the Commissariat of Public Health succeeded in getting social hygiene institutionalized, it proved unable to confer legitimacy on the fledgling field: in the medical schools professors of clinical medicine distrusted the emphasis of social hygiene on preventive medicine; and in research institutions, other medical specialists vied with social hygienists for the sponsorship of the Commissariat of Public Health. As a bureacratic actor, the Commissar of Public Health was constrained by the necessity of speaking on behalf of all physicians and by the perceived need not to champion one speciality to the exclusion of another. The limits of government patronage ultimately worked against social hygienists being able to fulfil their patron's mandate; at the same time, those limits constrained social hygienists in the pursuit of their own scientific goals

Keywords: Commissariat of Public Health; medical education; public health; RSFSR; scientific patron; social hygiene; social research on illness; Soviet


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