Maria Mayofis

The bacteriological revolution of the late nineteenth century produced a new professional culture that fused laboratory science with social engineering and the ambition to reform whole populations. By the 1930s a transnational milieu had taken shape around the Health Organization of the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation, linking bacteriologists, hygienists, and public health reformers across Europe and the United States. Many of its leading figures came from the Russian Empire or Eastern Europe, trained in Paris, Berlin, or Geneva in the 1900s and 1910s, held leftist convictions, and were active antifascists, several of Jewish origin. For a few years the milieu also included senior Soviet health administrators with parallel biographies, briefly useful to a Soviet state then seeking allies on the antifascist front. The Soviet members were destroyed during the Great Terror, their links to Western colleagues severed, and by 1939 the network had ceased to exist. Combining collective biography with institutional and intellectual history, the project reconstructs the formation, working life, and breakdown of this milieu and recovers an episode launched in Eastern Europe in the 1900s, broken in the late 1930s, and closed by the Second World War.