Introduction

The extent to which the life and works of Ivan Ivanovitch Manoukhin have been completely absorbed within Katherine Mansfield’s biography can be appreciated by the simplest Google search in English: entering nothing but his own name will produce results that are almost exclusively linked to KM’s treatment for tuberculosis, usually charging him with ‘bombarding’ her spleen with X-rays, with no source cited beyond Mansfield’s critics or biographers. Fortunately, the rare exceptions, reflecting medical research or source materials in French or Russian, are enabling recent cultural and medical historians to piece together Manoukhin’s life with more accuracy and insight.

Ivan Manoukhin grew up in the St Petersburg area and completed his studies in medicine at the St Petersburg Academy of Military Medicine, the country’s most prestigious school of military medicine, founded by Peter the Great in 1715, and the leading centre for medical research. His doctoral thesis, on leucocytolysis, was awarded the Akhmatov Prize in 1911, a distinction that earned him an essential post-doctoral research scholarship in Paris, where he studied and trained at the Pasteur Institute, in the laboratories of the pioneering zoologist, bacteriologist and immunologist, the Russian–Ukrainian Elia Metchnikoff. Metchnikoff had by then retired but he remained an eminent presence at the Institute, where he had worked for over twenty years, and together with his fellow researcher, Paul Erlich, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908. Metchnikoff’s interest in the research of Manoukhin was personally motivated as well as professional, his first wife having died of tuberculosis in 1873. He thus encouraged the young and gifted scholar to pursue his work on radiation treatment, his writings about which are held in the Pasteur library to this day. After this stay in Paris, Manoukhin returned to Russia, where he worked as a respected medical practitioner, specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. Among the dozens of patients he treated were his own wife, Tatiana Tamanin, and celebrated Russian author Maxim Gorky, both of whom were consequently cured. Gorky recounted his experience to H. G. Wells during the latter’s 1920 visit to Russia, and then introduced the writer to the exceptional doctor.