In Search of an Audience: Popular Pharmacies and the Limits of Literate Medicine in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Russia.

"First and foremost, what the works surveyed above show is that their compilers believed that the limits of literate medicine in Russia lay not at the edges of the court, but at the edges of literate society. Although some of these works were for specific patrons—Tsar Peter the Great, Tsarevich Aleksei, Military Governor Apraksin—many others were not designed with such a specific audience in mind, and seem to have been intended to be sold to any who would buy. Medical texts were promoted by Gurchin and Blumentrost not as specialist reading material for practitioners alone, but rather as part of a general readers’ library. The idea that medical works had a place in literate Russian culture is supported by the so-called satirical medical books, and the religious books that similarly copied medical genres. Despite their obvious aim of denigrating serious medical works, these texts in fact underline the place that medicine had in literate culture, by demonstrating the familiarity of their authors with such serious medical texts, and assuming such familiarity in their audience."