Writing this book would not have been possible without the financial contribution received from the University of Michigan, mainly from the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Department of History, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the International Institute, LACS, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Grant and a Rackham Merit Fellowship helped me conduct research in Germany and Poland from 2003 to 2005. LACS supported my first research trip to Brazil in 2012 and the University of Florida funded a second one in 2016. The generous support provided by these and other institutions allowed me to disseminate the ideas presented in this book in workshops, conferences, and annual meetings organized by prestigious entities such as the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; the American Historical Association; the German Historical Institute; the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; the São Paulo School of Advanced Studies on the Globalization of Culture in the Nineteenth Century; and the Polish Emigration Museum (Gdynia).
Parts of the preface and introduction of this book were presented in the conference “Thinking through the Cultural Turn—A Generation Reflects: Writing Histories in an Interdisciplinary and Transnational Age,” which I organized in Puerto Rico in 2007 with colleagues from U-M and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). The conference paper titled “An Ethnography of Knowledge: Doctors in Motion, Imperial Agendas, and the Study of Polish and German Subjectivities from a (Post) Colonial Perspective” was included in one of the numbers of Historia y Sociedad (published by UPR), which commemorated the event and a follow-up workshop held in Michigan in 2009. An earlier version of the first chapter and parts of the conclusion were published as “An Empire of Scientific Experts: Polish Physicians and the Medicalization of the German Borderlands, 1880–1918,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe: An Anthology, edited by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick. I want to thank the editorial board of Historia y Sociedad and Palgrave Macmillan for allowing me to include these works in this book.
My editors at Ohio University Press, John J. Bukowczyk and Gillian Berchowitz, have been truly amazing throughout the process of shaping my ideas into a coherent book. I thank them wholeheartedly for their encouragement and guidance and for their infinite patience. John has become a true mentor to me. His perceptive remarks helped me improve the manuscript in so many ways. I also want to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and copyeditor Ed Vesneske Jr. for their useful and insightful comments. Their questions and assessments allowed me to enrich the analysis and take my ideas in new directions.
During the time I did my main research work in Europe, I felt incredibly at home in Poland, and both Warsaw and Poznań became treasured cities to me. People were generally open and curious to learn about my project, which greatly helped improve my Polish and made the research process less lonely. I want to thank Tomasz Kizwalter (University of Warsaw), Magdalena Gawin (then at the Polish Academy of Sciences), Roman Meissner (Poznań University of Medical Sciences), Marek Czapliński (University of Wrocław), and Antoni Kuczyński (University of Wrocław) for taking the time to meet and share with me their work and expertise. I am also grateful to the many archivists and librarians in Germany, Poland, and Brazil who kindly assisted me in my research. Teodoro Alves and Maureen Elina Javorski at the Public Archives of Paraná (Arquivo Público do Paraná) were fundamental in providing me with key sources and materials about the Polish colonies in Brazil. I want to thank them for their great generosity and for the sources they sent me upon my return from the archives. I am also grateful to José Juan Pérez Meléndez at UC Davis for sharing with me his ideas on colonization policies in Brazil and pointing me towards the Brazilian National Archives in Rio de Janeiro.
This project also benefited from the conversations I have maintained throughout all these years with advisers and professors from my alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico. Carlos Pabón, Luis E. Agrait, Astrid Cubano Iguina, María del Carmen Baerga, Mayra Rosario Urrutia, and Carlos Ramos inspired me to become a historian and pursue my PhD degree. As a first-generation college graduate, I want to thank them for always being supportive of my academic pursuits.
I reserve my final thanks to my friends and family. I am deeply grateful to Juan R. Hernández García and Marie Cruz Soto for their love and continuous support. They have been my accomplices in most of my academic and personal adventures. My heartfelt thanks also go to many friends from my Ann Arbor years who offered me their assistance in varied ways. Among them, I want to thank Katie Wroblewski, Asli Gur, Rose Peruski, Emil Kerenji, Edin Hajdarpašić, Olivera Jokić, Rebecca Pite, Alice Weinreb, You-Sun Crystal Chung, Rebecca Grapevine, Emily Klencher, Susan Hwang, Yan Long, Dáša Frančíková, Alice Huang, Cheryl Israel, and Tae Woolfort.
Over the course of my academic journey, my family has been my refuge and major source of inspiration. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, who worked extremely hard to give me an education. My siblings Rosa Elena, José Reynaldo, María Estela, and Yessenia Mercedes made me immensely happy growing up. Without their love, and my mother’s sense of humor, I would have never made it this far.
Guide to Pronunciation
The following key provides a guide to the pronunciation of Polish words and names.
a is pronounced as in father
c as ts, as in cats
ch as guttural h, as in German BACH
cz as hard ch, as in church
g (always hard), as in get
i as ee, as in meet
j as y, as in yellow
rz as hard zh, as in French jardin
sz as hard sh, as in ship
szcz as hard shch, as in fresh cheese
u as oo, as in boot
w as v, as in vat
ć as soft ch, as in cheap
ś as soft sh, as in sheep
ż as hard zh, as in French jardin
ź as soft zh, as in seizure
ó as oo, as in boot
ą as a nasal, as in French bon
ę as a nasal, as in French vin or fin
ł as w, as in way
ń as ny, as in canyon
The accent in Polish words almost always falls on the penultimate syllable.
Introduction
THIS BOOK COMPLICATES the notion we have about colonial and imperial subjects by analyzing the role that medicine and scientific knowledge play in modern global history. It aims to recast Polish agency in the German Empire in the period of scientific transformations, mass migration, and heightened colonial expansion that largely characterized the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the chief contributions that this work provides to the field is the incorporation of Polish views into general debates about management of diseases, race science, and civilizing projects. It analyzes Polish encounters with colonizing practices in Africa and South America and adds to the history of medicine and public health in the Polish lands—two areas that until recently had not