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of the atmosphere, appear to have been particularly favorable in the development of the disease.⁴⁰

      Therefore, a combination of cultural, social, ethnic, and environmental factors helped explain the incidence of the illness in Upper Silesia.⁴¹ Poverty was seen as a key cause in the dissemination of the disease there, as it was in other German provinces. However, in the German East, Slavic culture and ethnicity were described as two determining conditions that made typhus endemic to the region. Rather than considering typhus a transient epidemic as in other parts of Germany, Hirsch’s historico-geographical study of the disease made the case for a more permanent status in the region because of its Slavic character.⁴² The sources that Hirsch used to describe the illness helped naturalize and identify typhus with Polish subjects by specifically embodying the disease in the inhabitants and territories of the eastern borderlands.

      The epidemic outbreaks of 1831 and 1832 in Upper Silesia and other parts of the eastern borderlands coincided with the November Uprising in Russian Poland. The revolt had major consequences for Poles living in the Russian Empire and for Polish-speaking subjects in the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. The uprising began in 1830 when a group of Polish insurgents took up arms against the Russian government, which allegedly planned to use the Polish army to crush the revolutions in Belgium and France. The collapse of the Polish insurrection in 1831 caused the suspension, in all three partitions, of many important cultural and political concessions that had been given to Polish subjects in 1815, and initiated the process of Russification and Germanization of the Polish lands. Evidently, 1815 and 1831 were not only turning points in the history of typhus in Europe but also in Polish history.

      Despite the fact that Poles from Russian Poland were for the most part perceived as national martyrs throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, the November Uprising caused a great deal of political and cultural tension in the eastern borderlands. Frederick William III appointed Eduard Heinrich Flottwell, a Prussian statesman from East Prussia, to be the provincial president of the Grand Duchy of Posen, the heartland of Prussian Poland. Flottwell inaugurated a series of anti-Polish measures that intensified the process of Germanization, thus affecting the subsequent relations among Germans, Poles, and Jews in the province. Assimilation policies were also adopted in West Prussia, which had a sizeable Polish-speaking population, but not to the same extent as in the Grand Duchy of Posen. Throughout the Prussian-Polish territories, the state promoted the use of German in secondary schools and the settlement of German peasantry in the province.

      After the November Uprising, approximately ten thousand Poles fled Russian Poland, most of them members of the Polish elite.⁴³ A number of them settled in Berlin, but the vast majority migrated to western Europe, especially to France. This migration sparked a vibrant Polish cultural and political movement in Prussian Poland through the intellectual networks established between inhabitants of the three partitions and Polish émigrés in France. It also raised for the first time the question of overseas colonies as a solution to the Polish question in Europe. In a letter to a friend in which Jan Koźmian recounted his experience of being in exile in France in 1841, the Polish priest observed, “Some friends of the Polish matter believed, and still believe, that Poles ought to establish a colony in any part of the New World, and then they could form, through its homogeneity, an awe-inspiring whole. But how likely is the establishment of a colony, when one constantly preserves the thought of returning and a perpetual hope?”⁴⁴ For Koźmian, the founding of a colony was not viable because of the dream of independence shared by many Polish émigrés.

      The political tensions deriving from the 1830 rising in Russian Poland help to contextualize the anti-Slavic views expressed in the Upper Silesian medical report of 1833 cited by August Hirsch. Although the revolt had major political consequences for the Grand Duchy of Posen and West Prussia, it highlighted the problem of Polish cultural and national alliance in the borderlands. Reaction to the typhus outbreaks in the early part of the nineteenth century continued to stress the Polish question and to discursively bring together Polish-speaking subjects across the partitioned lands. It defined Poles in terms of an essence rooted in ethnic and cultural traits that, according to many physicians, carried the threat of infection.

      However, not everyone shared the view that “Slavic descent” and cultural habits were a precondition of the disease. Rudolf Virchow’s report on the typhus epidemic of 1848 presents a quite complicated social view of the causation of the disease.⁴⁵ The report was part of the author’s advocacy for a health care reform program in the German lands. It was characterized by the dire criticism the physician expressed against the Prussian state and the unorthodox solution he offered to the Polish question. The typhus epidemic provided Virchow with the perfect opportunity to attack Prussian authoritarianism and promote his political views in the critical years of Germany’s own revolutionary upheavals and the “welfare for us all” struggle that many believed in at the time.

      Virchow was one of the most influential German physicians and physical anthropologists in the nineteenth century. He was born in Pomerania, a province with a significant number of Kashubian and Polish speakers. According to medical historian Paolo Scarani, Virchow’s ethnic ancestry is controversial, suggesting that the physician might have been of Polish or Slavic descent. Scarani argues that the experiences the physician had with Poles in his native land of Pomerania must have at least influenced him regarding the respect he professed for Polish and Slavic cultures and the political and social actions he took as a scientist.⁴⁶

      The physician made important contributions in the fields of anatomical pathology, experimental science, and public health. In the 1870s, Virchow headed the canalization and hygienic reforms that modernized and protected Berlin from many infectious diseases. He was a prolific writer and social activist, having socialist inclinations in the 1840s but becoming a staunch antisocialist after national unification. He warned his colleagues about the dangers of Darwinist evolutionary theories and socialism in a paper he delivered to the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians in 1877.⁴⁷ In the 1880s, he opposed Germany’s overseas colonial expansion and remained a critic of the germ theory of disease until his death in 1902. For Virchow, medicine was “a social science, and politics [was] nothing more than medicine on a grand scale.”⁴⁸ The physician believed that the teachings of medicine should be used to alleviate social ills and improve the living conditions of the less fortunate in society.

      Although Virchow maintained good relations with Poles in general, his anticlerical stance led him to support Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland in the 1870s and 1880s. He believed that Catholicism posed great obstacles to the liberal development of the nation. In fact, it was Virchow who coined the term Kulturkampf as a way to emphasize the German nation’s struggle for its culture and progress against the “backward” views and “medieval” legacies of the Catholic Church. As historian Andrew Zimmerman argues, “Kultur, for Virchow, represented all that he imagined that Catholicism opposed: the strength of the nation, freedom of thought, and the progress of natural science.”⁴⁹ One of the recommendations that he mentioned in his typhus report of 1848 to improve the conditions of Upper Silesians was to abolish the local power of Catholic priests in the region. Contrary to other German officials, Virchow distinguished between being anticlerical and anti-Polish, and supported Polish subjects in many other political aspects. For example, he sided with Poles against the Russians during the January Uprising of 1863. He also maintained ties with Polish physicians, communicating with them in their native language and becoming an honorary member of the Poznanian Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk) in 1891.⁵⁰ He remained a member of the scientific organization until his death in 1902.

      Moreover, at a time when others were positing the racialized superior ways of Germans over Poles and other Slavic cultures, Virchow argued that cultural difference was not an indicator of racial difference. He did not believe that identity attributes such as language, nationality, culture, and race had to overlap.⁵¹ The racial survey he conducted in the 1870s concluded that the majority of Germans were of mixed types and that only 32 percent of the German population belonged to the Germanic, blond, Nordic type. The study, which examined the eye, hair, and skin color of over six million children throughout the empire and separated Jews from the rest of the population, was carried out in response to the French

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