Therapeutic Natures : Environment and Health in the Soviet Sanatorium

In Therapeutic Natures, Johanna Conterio analyzes the development of the institution of the Soviet sanatorium as a project of building socialism, a "Magnitstroi of health." The sanatorium not only served as a curative space in nature to counterbalance the intense and often hazardous environmental conditions of Soviet labor, but also monumentalized the achievements and the anxieties of Soviet socialism.

Conterio reveals how health resort towns, and the individual sanatoria within them, served a central role in a distinct socialist model of public health and welfare that emerged in the late nineteenth century, developed in the Soviet Union in response to domestic, transnational, and international events—the Second International, the October Revolution, Stalinism, World War II, and the Cold War. This model foregrounded the study of climate, geography and landscape in medical research and understandings of the human body as ecologically embedded in the physical environment, producing environmental knowledge that informed medical practice and the design of the built and natural environments of what became therapeutic landscapes. Ultimately, a distinct form of environmental governance developed in Soviet health resorts, linked to the authority of medical officials within the planned economy, and offering historians a counterpart to the model of ecocide. Therapeutic Natures outlines an experimental attempt to create healthy environments for optimal human development, rooted in socialist conceptual approaches to human life in the environment