Создавая советскую историю медицины: статья И. Д. Страшуна для энциклопедии 1936 года

Электронный научно-образовательный журнал "История". 2023.

Belik K.

The "History of Medicine" as an independent scientific discipline took shape in the Soviet

period and became an autonomous research space. The main and first text describing the disciplinary

rationale and main scientific principles of medical history was the encyclopedic article "Medicine". It

was written by Ilya Strashun for the first edition of the Great Medical Encyclopedia and was published

in 1936 in volume 17. This text was the result of a Soviet experiment in disciplinary construction in

which medicine was articulated in a new system of coordinates. In this article, drawing on the methods

of discourse analysis proposed by Michel Foucault and Umberto Eco, the author attempts to examine

the history of the text and to relate it to pre-existing narratives on medical history. The author analyses

ways of adapting the existing practices of describing the history of medicine to the new Soviet language.

Particular attention is paid to the identification of the discourse’s types included in the text of the article

and the emergence among them of discursive elements unconventional for the Soviet text. The

concluding section there is a reference to the role of historical science in the creation of the encyclopedic

text and the cumulative status of the history of medicine. The I. D. Strashun's role in establishing a new

discourse order and the systematization of the accumulated knowledge of medical history is revealed.

Keywords: Soviet history, история идей, советская история, discourse analysis, history of medicine, история медицины, history of ideas, дискурс анализ, I. D. Strashun, Great Medical Encyclopedia, disciplinary history, И. Д. Страшун, Большая медицинская энциклопедия, дисциплинарная история