The Empress and the English Doctor

 My library pick last month was Lucy Ward's book, The Empress and the English Doctor. While not my usual military history fare, Catherine is a key player in my current writing project.

Thomas Dimsdale was a physician from Hertfordshire, England, known for his expertise in smallpox inoculation. He had published a book, The Present Method of Inoculating for Smallpox (1767), which attracted Catherine's attention. She invited him to Russia to perform the procedure.

Dimsdale arrived in St. Petersburg in 1768 and faced significant challenges. Inoculating a monarch and the heir to the throne was a high-stakes endeavour. Failure could result in political or personal ruin or worse, and the consequences for Russia could have been incalculable. Catherine put her Royal Yacht on standby to whisk Dimsdale and his son away if it went wrong.

To ensure success, Catherine underwent a preparatory regimen to optimise her health. The inoculation was conducted in secrecy to avoid public panic or political fallout. It was successful, and Catherine recovered without complications. She even ordered her court to follow suit, popularising the practice among the Russian nobility. She went on to institute other much-needed medical reforms.

While British kings had inoculated their children, Catherine was the only reigning monarch to undergo the procedure - an act of courage that has since been all but forgotten. The methodology was not the refined modern vaccination but simply inserted a small amount of infected matter into pierced skin. This conveyed a mild case of the illness and a lifetime immunity. The idea made its way into Europe from Turkey, where elderly women delivered the jab with a blunt needle. 

This is topical, given the anti-vaxers in our own age, and was even more controversial in the 18th century. Reading this book, my admiration for Catherine went up a notch. It took some nerve to do this, given the religious and political views of the period. Even in Britain, where the beneficial results were clear, churchmen claimed it interfered with the divine plan, "God sent the disease either for the trial of our faith or for the punishment of our sins." Other objections were as remarkably ill-informed as the conspiracy theorists of the 21st century.

A fascinating story, well-researched and told.

Cartoon showing Edward Jenner, Thomas Dimsdale and George Rose seeing off opponents of vaccination.