Karol Marcinkowski was also a key figure in the formation of an educated Polish middle class in Prussian Poland. He created in 1832 the first Medical Society (Towarzystwa Lekarskiego) in Posen, which included Polish and German members.89 He organized meetings with the Royal Medical Council in Posen (Königliches Medizinal-Kollegium zu Posen) to discuss statistical data about epidemics and clinical research. He also founded the Society for Academic Aid to the Youth of the Grand Duchy of Posen (Towarzystwo Naukowej Pomocy dla Młodzieży Wielkiego Księstswa Poznańskiego) in 1841 to promote the study of the sciences in the province. The cholera epidemics had convinced Marcinkowski that a poor city like Posen needed more physicians and people with scientific training.90 The Society for Academic Aid was the first institution to offer scholarships to Polish students from all over the Prussian-Polish provinces. Although medicine was a priority, recipients were also trained to become businesspeople, teachers, lawyers, and technicians. This society was replicated in other territories with a significant Polish-speaking population such as West Prussia and Galicia (Austrian Empire).91 It was also the model followed in the creation of the Society for Academic Aid to Polish Girls (Towarzystwo Pomocy Naukokowej dla Dziewcząt Polskich), founded in Thorn in 1869 and Posen in 1871.92
Polish physicians trained in the second half of the nineteenth century considered Marcinkowski an influential figure and founding father of the Polish medical profession in Prussian Poland. He was viewed as a patriot who fought for the Polish national cause and contributed to the development of Polish society. He was deeply troubled by the poverty many suffered in his hometown and sought ways to improve their condition, mainly through medicine and social activism. According to Dr. Ignacy Zielewicz, Marcinkowski was arrested at a young age for his political involvement in the student organization Polonia, a Polish fraternity with liberal views founded at the University of Berlin.93 He worked for several years as a surgeon and obstetrician at the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy (Szpital Sióstr Miłosierdzia/Hospital der grauen Schwestern) in Posen before joining the Polish November Uprising in 1830. During the revolution, he fought the Russians in Lithuania and became an expert in cholera treatment after working on patients at a hospital in the village of Mienia. He also treated cholera patients in Memel (Prussia) on his way back from the war front.94 During his exile years in Scotland and Paris he learned new medical techniques and shared his knowledge on the disease with French physicians. In fact, he was allowed to come back to Posen due to the cholera epidemic of 1837, where he joined other physicians in the fight against the disease.
To this date, Karol Marcinkowski is remembered as a great benefactor of the Polish sciences, the one who opened up the medical profession to Prussian-Polish members of the middle and lower-middle classes. He also set many of the parameters for the foundation of medical and scientific organizations in defense of Polish culture. His political engagements in the first half of the nineteenth century had significant influence on Polish medicine and the political mission of Polish physicians in the region.
After Marcinkowski’s death, the main organization in charge of the promotion of Polish culture and scientific activities was the Poznanian Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauki) (PTPN). The initiative to form PTPN came from Kazimierz Szulc in 1856. Szulc, a Poznanian ethnographer, teacher, and journalist, met with about sixty people from the area to discuss the project. The organization was established a year later following the model of the Warsaw Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Warszawskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk).95 The Varsovian society had been created in 1800 with the goal of expanding Polish scientific knowledge, but was shut down in 1832 due to the Russification policies introduced in the Kingdom of Poland after the November Uprising. In Posen, members of the PTPN took an active role in countering Germanizing projects and in protecting the Polish language. The society was also connected with other organizations and with the main local newspaper, Dziennik Poznański (Poznanian daily), founded in 1859 by Karol Libelt, a liberal political activist and president of PTPN from 1868 to 1875.96
From the beginning, PTPN was a multidisciplinary organization that sought to cultivate Polish literature, sciences, and history. It also aimed to join efforts to counter anti-Polish religious and political attacks in the region. The society was inaugurated in 1857 with two sections, the Department of Historical and Moral Sciences (Wydział Nauk Historycznych i Moralnych) and the Department of Natural Sciences (Wydział Nauk Przyrodniczych). The latter was directed by Ludwik Gąsiorowski, a Poznanian physician trained in Breslau, considered the father of Polish medical history.97 The Department of Natural Sciences had a chemical laboratory, and one of its major goals was the establishment of a museum of natural history. The membership of the PTPN continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, and the organization was further divided into several departments and commissions. In 1865, physicians formed their own section and separated from the Department of Natural Sciences. The Medical Department, which started with twenty-five members, rapidly expanded, having followers from the Prussian-Polish provinces and several cities in the Kingdom of Poland, Lemberg (Lwów), St. Petersburg, Berlin, Kiev, and many other places. Moreover, the department managed to found in 1889 the first Polish medical journal in Germany, called Nowiny lekarskie (Medical news).
The Society for Academic Aid and PTPN were the two primary institutions that enabled the consolidation of the Polish medical profession under the German Empire. While the former helped increase Polish representation in the profession, traditionally dominated by Germans until the 1880s, the latter allowed for the creation of an intellectual milieu in which the new class could form a cultural basis for their scientific works and political activism. These institutions, established mainly in reaction to Germanization projects and an overall need for the modernization of the lands, allowed many Polish physicians to carry out their research agenda, discuss their findings, and elaborate their own theories about disease causation. In addition to this, they kept statistical records of diseases and educated others about hygienic matters.
This chapter has analyzed the salient discourses that Germans developed concerning the eastern borderlands in the context of the political and cultural conflicts that influenced Polish-German relations during the first half of the nineteenth century. It has pointed to the works of Gustav Freytag, Georg Forster, Immanuel Kant, and Rudolf Virchow as examples of the ethnographic and literary accounts that provided the basis for a civilizing mission in the area and helped put the Polish question at the center of German liberal debates. Even the most sympathetic views of the provinces, such as Virchow’s account of Upper Silesian suffering in 1848, supported the idea that German colonization in the form of Germanizing policies and in the name of secularization and progress was the solution for the cultural integration of the Polish lands. For many German intellectuals, the Polish nobility and clergy represented the despotic ills they were trying to transform in the German lands, and the poor conditions of the masses were the consequence of the “backward” governance system that Poles had lived under in the past.
Two of the goals here have been to study the role of epidemic diseases in the creation of Polish and German identities, and to examine the emergence of Polish scientific organizations in the context of Prussia’s cultural and political endeavors in the region. Cholera and typhus epidemics contributed to the construction of the eastern borderlands as vulnerable areas, which led to calls for the expansion of the medical profession and served to underscore the dangers the lands posed for Germans in the region and the German nation. The German administration tended to read the cultural contacts between Poles from Prussian Poland and the other two Polish partitions as biopolitical threats that could spread the infection of diseases, political instability, and uprisings.
The partitioned Polish lands were not only connected by diseases that migrated from east to west but also by images of uncleanliness and underdevelopment. These views were disseminated in numerous German medical reports