Balneo Reference
An open reference on Russian and Soviet balneology.
What this is
An open reference on Russian and Soviet balneology. Each record describes one printed primary source: what it says, in verbatim quotations with page numbers, and separately what it does not say.
How this differs from a summary
- Every quotation has been checked by a human against an image of the original page — against the scan, not the text file: the text layer is produced by OCR, and OCR fails silently.
- Every record has a section on what the source does not contain: what the study did not test, which groups were not examined, which conclusions do not follow from it.
- And a section on how the record may be misquoted — the claim that is tempting to draw from it but does not follow.
- Negative results are given alongside positive ones. If a water showed no advantage in a study, or caused complaints, that is in the record.
Who runs it
A private initiative. This is not the official site of the Pyatigorsk Research Institute of Balneology, nor of any state body; the institute is not involved in the content and bears no responsibility for it.
Contact: itinbalneo@gmail.com
What it is based on
The corpus holds 351 digitised sources on balneology and the mineral waters of the Caucasian Mineral Waters region: dissertations, collected papers, reports and monographs of the Pyatigorsk State Research Institute of Balneology and Physiotherapy, issues of the journal Kurortnaya Meditsina (Resort Medicine), and manuals of resort medicine. Published between 1923 and 2023.
Records are written one at a time, from a source read in full. There are few published records so far, and that is deliberate: speed would mean nothing here.
Terms of use
The content of this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may quote and republish it, including commercially, provided you cite the permanent URL of the record. Every record carries a ready-made citation block in GOST and APA formats.
Rights in the primary sources themselves belong to their holders; page images are not published on this site.
Catalogue
All records in one list, with water, condition and weight of evidence.
The records themselves exist in Russian only for now. Work titles and abstracts are translated; the full record opens via the Russian link.
Source records
-
Крашеница Г. М. Курортное лечение больных алиментарным ожирением (1971)
Author's abstract of a doctoral dissertation carried out at the Pyatigorsk State Research Institute of Balneology and Physiotherapy. 567 patients with alimentary obesity were observed at the Essentuki resort. Four...
-
Крашеница Г. М. Курортное лечение сахарного диабета (1986)
A popular-science book by a physician of the Yessentuki Clinic of the Pyatigorsk State Research Institute of Balneology and Physiotherapy, summarising the institute's long-term research and the author's own clinical...
For machine reading
This site is built to be read by programs no less than by people. The content arrives in the first HTML response; no JavaScript is used for text.
Every record and the catalogue are also served as Markdown — the same address with index.md appended.
- llms.txt — short index following the llmstxt.org specification
- llms-full.txt — full text of every record in one file
- sitemap.xml
- robots.txt