“Elephant Ayurveda” at the 18th-century Russian Court: Medical Pluralism, Technology Transfer, and Avatars of Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article analyzes Russian documents of the 18th century related to the delivery of elephants to the Russian court, their allowance and treatment. The study focuses on the political and technological aspects of the animals’ life. The relocation of elephants from eastern powers to Moscow and St Petersburg was part of animal diplomacy and was conditioned by the status of animals as avatars of power. In turn, elephantine political charisma encouraged both parties — the donor and recipient of living gifts — to invest considerable effort in maintaining their well-being. For this purpose, the Russian Empire imported elephant keepers (mahouts), oriental food and Ayurvedic medicines. The author proposes to consider people, equipment, food, and medicinal matter as components of a technological system. The relocation of elephants between different states is interpreted as a case of technology transfer, which follows the same logic as the more explored scalable technologies. In this way, the therapeutic landscape of the Russian Empire was enriched with enclaves of Eastern medical knowledge that were conditioned by animal life. The results of the study not only complicate current ideas about historical configurations of medical pluralism, but also provide new insights into the grand narrative about the trajectories of knowledge importation in early modern Russia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".