KWARTALNIK HISTORII NAUKI I TECHNIKI  T. 64  2019  nr 2  s. 61–78 DOI 10.4467/0023589XKHNT.19.014.10344 Elena Vishlenkova National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation ORCID 0000-0002-9471-0091 Sergei Zatravkin N.A. Semashko National Research Institute of Public Health, Moscow, Russian Federation ORCID 0000-0002-2930-1873 Polish Medicine in the Russian Empire in the First Third of the 19 th Century An official’s complaint about a Polish private doctor who treated his children for scarlet fever in 1827 gave rise to a unique document – a description of the treatment process and of the doctor’s interaction with patients, pharmacists, and Russian authorities. Such evidence is rarely found in the Russian archives. Since private doctors did not report to the officials, their testimonies, as a rule, are not preserved in the state archives. A text found in the archives of the Vilna Medical Board stimulated the authors of the present article to investigate the state of medical care and medical culture of the Polish population that became part of the Russian Empire after the Third Partition of Poland. Vishlenkova and Zatravkin have found that, unlike the rest of the Empire, a rather dense network of private medical care existed in Vilna province until the 1830s, and the level of scientific medical culture of the patients allowed them to establish control over treatment. Keywords: Russian Empire, Vilna province, history of medicine, scientific medical culture, private medicine, history of science Słowa kluczowe: Cesarstwo Rosyjskie, gubernia wileńska, historia medycyny, naukowa kultura medyczna, medycyna prywatna, historia nauki The territories acquired by the Russian Empire as a result of the partitions of Poland (1797) retained the old social structure and infrastructure of city life for a long time in the new state, being only weakly subordinated to the Russian bureaucracy. This statement could be confirmed by the study of the market of medical services in Vilna (Vilno, Wilna, Wil- no, now Vilnius) governorate. At that time the demand and satisfaction of the need for medical care depended directly upon the living standards of the population and on the development of the state, its administrative and financial resources. In this regard, the