What would you do to heal yourself? Would you take a new medicine from a far-away place, listen to a doctor’s advice that contradicted your own beliefs, or rely on your own judgement and your local resources? This talk will show how the early modern Russian elite balanced their access to global markets with local understandings of the Russian Orthodox Christian body to form a kind of medical practice that drew on foreign practices without being determined by them.
Clare Griffin is a graduate of University College London and Assistant Professor of Russian History at Indiana University Bloomington. Her first book, Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia, appeared in 2022 with McGill-Queens University Press. She is now working on her next project which is about disability in early modern Russia, with a particular focus on wounded soldiers.