Profession of Revulsion: Subjective Science and the Mobilization of Emotions in Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Public Medicine

This essay explores the rhetoric used by Russian zemstvo physicians, scholars of medicine, and sanitary inspectors to share their expertise with regard to health problems in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Borrowing the conceptual framework of emotional practices introduced by Monique Scheer, it interprets an appeal to revulsion and sensorial evidence, employed as "templates of language and gesture," that medical practitioners produced both to mobilize the emotions of their audience and to support their own professional stature. The author relates elements of this judgmental rhetoric to the Russian public domain of the late nineteenth century and discusses the entanglements of hygiene, prevention, and revulsion that contributed to the emotional landscape of the post-reform era.