The typhus epidemic confronted Prussians with a part of the kingdom that overturned every claim made about German progress and development and provided the ground for many Poles from other Polish provinces to rediscover Upper Silesia as a common cultural and national space. In a speech given in 1881, Franciszek Chłapowski, the first practicing Poznanian physician in Upper Silesia, reminded the members of the political party, Polish Circle (Koło Polskie), in Posen that “no one among us has bothered about Upper Silesia until now. We hardly knew that over a million kinsmen lived there, whose language, customs, and traditions were the same.”65 This cultural recognition came from the physician at a time when other members of the Polish Circle still viewed Upper Silesians as “merely one of the other peoples of the Empire.”66 The medicalization of the Prussian-Polish provinces and the mapping of typhus incidence and other diseases, in the context of political revolutions and Germanization policies, were certainly key elements in bringing about this national consciousness.
Chłapowski spent a considerable part of his medical and political career in Upper Silesia. His first encounter with the people of the region was as a military doctor during the Franco-Prussian War. He served in the Third Upper Silesian Regiment of National Defense, where he found out that most of the soldiers could not speak German and that “under a thin layer of Germandom in Silesia, live[d] authentic Poles.”67 This revelation made Chłapowski admire the population and consider them hardworking people who loved their language and religious beliefs above all. For him, it was precisely the close relationship between Polish culture and Catholicism that allowed Upper Silesians to preserve their Polishness. According to Chłapowski, “every German feels called to bring [German] culture, i.e., the extermination of everything that is Polish, while the Upper Silesian knows how to resist it, and his only point of support is the Catholic faith.”68 The physician was one of the earliest Polish intellectuals to propose a marriage between science and religion to combat Germanization policies in the Prussian-Polish provinces. He also believed that liberal Poznanians and Galicians had a great deal to learn from the Upper Silesian experience. While Virchow in 1848 considered religion to be detrimental to the progress of the region, Chłapowski deemed a few decades later that those religious beliefs were key to supporting the Polish nationalist movement.
Cholera and the Office of Imperial Health
Immediately after unification in 1871, authorities of the new German Empire initiated plans to found an institution that would oversee the overall health of the population. In 1876, they created the Office of Imperial Health (Kaiserliches Gesundheitsamt), the main goal of which was to study and keep statistical records on diseases, births, and mortality rates in Germany. It was also responsible for proposing public health laws based on experience and scientific research.69 A director and an advisory council of sixteen members from various states of the empire constituted the administrative body of the office. The first appointed director was Bismarck’s personal physician, Heinrich Struck. Robert Koch, one of the founders of the germ theory, joined the advisory council in 1880 and served as provisional director from 1884 to 1885. After Koch’s arrival in Berlin, the Office of Imperial Health became a prestigious research facility and a main training center for disease control. It designed programs to educate the overall population in hygienic matters and promote the teaching of experimental science throughout Germany.
The proposal to create the Office of Imperial Health came directly from members of several medical organizations. The project was first proposed in 1869 at the forty-third annual Assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians (Versammlung der deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte) in Innsbruck and was further developed at the next meeting in Rostock.70 These professional encounters led to the creation of the German Medical Association (Deutsche Ärztevereinsbund), founded in Leipzig in 1872. The association sought to promote and safeguard the professional interests of the medical class. It lobbied for expanded, improved public health regulations and the inclusion of physicians in official matters related to national health care.71 Representatives of the organization considered that the progress of the nation could not be achieved “without the state and science being two of a kind.”72 They advocated for a centralized administration that would work together with local governments and physicians in the institutionalization of health policies for the new empire. The idea of forming an institute in charge of public health arose in response to the political unification of the German lands, the political expansion of the medical class, and two major cholera epidemics that assailed the country in 1866 and 1873. Of the twenty-one scientific organizations that signed the petition to found the Office of Imperial Health in 1875, only one, the Society of Physicians from Upper Silesia, came from the eastern borderlands.
First on the agenda of the Office of Imperial Health was the improvement of statistical methods to enable authorities to enact effective control measures against epidemic threats. Compiling statistical data about disease propagation was confirmed as essential at the many international sanitary conferences on cholera that were held throughout the nineteenth century. The need to count and classify individuals in light of the dangers that a disease posed to the empire had enormous consequences for the Prussian-Polish provinces. The territories were the place where authorities tended to record the highest rates of cholera cases, many of them attributing the disease to insalubrious Polish customs and geographical proximity to the Russian Empire. The drive to count individuals and their diseases contributed greatly to the statistical battles that Germans and Poles engaged in over the national character of the territories in later decades. Judging by the large number of cholera cases attributed to Polish-speaking subjects, it became easy for people to imagine the eastern borderlands as Polish and not German. Similar to typhus, the cholera disease served to point out the lack of Germanization, but also to imprint the territories with a “Polish essence” that troubled many German physicians and nationalists.
Another important point in the agenda of the Office of Imperial Health was the creation of a bill for compulsory autopsies to enable physicians from all over Germany to investigate the specific cause of a disease. The handling of dead bodies was an issue that provoked many religious and political controversies, especially among Jewish and Catholic communities.73 For example, during the cholera epidemic of 1831, many of the regulations enacted were at odds with local customs and conflicted with religious precepts. People protested what they saw as the disrespectful measures that physicians and authorities used when dealing with the bodies of their deceased family members. Therefore, efforts to pass the bill approving compulsory post-mortem examinations were met with great resistance, and the imperial government was never able to approve a uniform regulation that applied to all the German states.74 Only the bill to combat diseases considered dangerous to public safety (Gesetz zur Bekämpfung gemeingefährlicher Krankheiten)—proposed during the cholera epidemic of 1892 but not passed until 1900—allowed physicians to carry out compulsory autopsies in places affected by epidemic outbreaks.
The fact that cholera played a fundamental role in the establishment of the Office of Imperial Health meant that many of the measures created to protect the German Empire were directed against sources of infection in the Prussian-Polish provinces. Since early on in the history of the disease, many Germans tended to associate cholera with Polish subjects, given that infection usually followed an east to west course and the outbreaks coincided with the Polish uprisings throughout the nineteenth century. Also, the first real encounter that German authorities had with the disease was in 1831, as events of the Polish uprising in the Kingdom of Poland were unfolding.75 Therefore, it was easy for many to conflate political and scientific discourses when judging events in the provinces and their neighboring lands. While serious cases of the illness were classified as “Asiatic cholera,” because scientists established the origins of the disease in India, the less-threatening cases were called “cholera nostras” (native cholera) or sporadic cholera.76 Throughout the nineteenth