Pavel Vasilyev

Unlikely Allies in Project-Based Learning: Bridging Socio-Cultural and Institutional Approaches to Teaching the History of Medicine

Pavel Vasilyev

HSE University

pvasilev@hse.ru

The history of medicine in the Russian educational context is taught mainly in medical higher educational institutions or in the medical schools of multidisciplinary universities by people with a medical educational background. The so-called ‘new’ or ‘social’ history of medicine, researched and taught mostly by critically minded historians without professional medical training and emphasizing the socio-cultural aspects of health and suffering, made its way to Russia in the early 21st century but has likewise remained marginal and with little institutional basis in the country. Moreover, the two approaches to teaching the history of medicine have become highly antagonistic towards each other. This article presents a fundamentally different experience of teaching the history of medicine in the Russian context, an attempt to build bridges between ‘institutional’ and ‘social’ histories of medicine that was made by a team of scholars with a history background at HSE University starting in 2020. The group of two instructors and six students, located in two cities, managed to establish cooperation with the staff of the Museum of the Preobrazhensky Psychiatric Hospital, whose relatively unexplored archive was only fragmentarily described and needed to be organized and digitized. We hypothesize that the results of our educational innovations will be applicable not only in Russia, but in the post-Soviet space more broadly. More generally, this approach can be relevant for locations where social history of medicine is weakly institutionalized and/or seen as culturally foreign or irrelevant while the more traditional version of the discipline is also losing status and resources.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Pavel Vasilyev is an Associate Professor and Head of the History of Russian Psychiatry Research Study Group at HSE University in St. Petersburg. He defended his doctoral dissertation on drug abuse and drug policy in early ‎Soviet Russia at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian ‎Academy of Sciences in 2013. Between 2014 and 2019, Pavel was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin and at the Polonsky Academy in Jerusalem. His recent publications include articles in Archives of Diseases in Childhood, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Clinical Trials, Contemporary Drug Problems, and The European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health as well as contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History and The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Bioethics. Pavel’s research interests include the history of Russian and Soviet medicine, drug policy, mental health, and reproductive health.