The Tsar's Doctor Read online

  Outstanding among other greatly eminent men at Edinburgh were James Hamilton, the first Professor of Midwifery in Scotland, and John Thomson, lecturer on Pathology, another who ranked first in his field. Best known of all, perhaps, was Professor James Gregory, inventor of Gregory’s mixture (a laxative compounded mainly of rhubarb) and already a household name.

  Wylie matriculated in anatomy and surgery in 1786, in medical theory and practice in 1787, and in anatomy and surgery in 1788. He gained his practical knowledge in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, one of the most advanced hospitals of the day. The matriculation records in Edinburgh University Library attest to Wylie’s achievements over the space of three years, the usual time taken to qualify as a practitioner at that time.

  The surgical skills he gained in Edinburgh were to stand him in good stead, and the fact that he left the university without graduating was not unusual at the time. Adventure was all that mattered to him. Moreover money could be made abroad. It was certainly hard to find at home. If legend can be believed Wylie, at one time, together with some of his equally penniless friends, was funding his exploits in the taverns of Edinburgh by selling stolen sheep. Somehow this enterprise was brought to the attention of the authorities, and Wylie soon discovered that officers of the law were on his trail. Some years before a man named Robert Livingston had been ‘banished from the Shire of Clackmannan’ for the same offence and had been warned that if he were caught again he would be subject to the death penalty.3 Thus with the threat of the gallows looming, Wylie, his pockets stuffed with money from the sale of the stolen animals, persuaded a farmer, who may have been one of his gang, to drive him to the docks of Leith, then the main embarkation point for Europe, hidden in his cart beneath a load of hay.

  Wylie sailed for Russia by way of Gothenburg in Sweden. He then travelled on to Riga, a shipping centre in western Russia, now the largest city in the Baltic States. There he found that because he had failed to graduate in Edinburgh, he had to take an examination at the city’s medical college in order to be eligible to practise as a surgeon. Having passed, he set off for St Petersburg, where, at the Medical Collegium, then the highest medical institution in Russia, he passed yet another examination, which allowed foreigners to practise there. Then, on 9 December 1790, he was assigned to the Yelets [Eletsky] Infantry Regiment as a surgeon.4

  CHAPTER TWO

  Performer of Miracles

  Wylie came to Russia at a time when the country was ruled by one of the most extraordinary and dynamic women who have ever lived: Catherine the Great.

  Born in the Baltic city of Stettin, Pomerania, in 1729, the daughter of Prince Christian Augustus of Anhalt-Zerbst, and his wife Joanna, Princess of Holstein-Gottorp, Sophie Augusta Frederica, as she was christened, was remarkably ugly as a child. By the age of thirteen, however, she was beginning to show signs of the beauty and sensuality which would hold so many men enthralled. Her portrait, painted by the French artist Antoine Pesne, was sent to the Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, and Tsarina of Russia since the death from smallpox of her elder sister’s son. Unmarried herself, she was impressed by the likeness of the young Sophie, whom she thought a suitable bride for the unattractive and sickly Prince Peter Ulrich of Holstein, her nephew and heir. The marriage took place in 1745 when Peter was seventeen and Catherine, as Sophie’s name was changed to, was sixteen.

  Catherine was not in love with her husband but she wanted to be a queen. She soon began to take lovers, and afraid that Peter wanted to get rid of her, she agreed to participate in a plot, orchestrated by three brothers named Orlov, to have him put under house arrest. On the morning of 28 June 1762, she set off by coach from Peterhof to St Petersburg. Reaching the Winter Palace, she came out on the balcony with her young son Paul beside her, while crowds cheered ecstatically below.

  Shortly afterwards she issued a manifesto to justify her reasons for subjecting her husband’s power.

  Firstly she claimed that Orthodoxy was being threatened by foreign creeds; secondly, that Peter had betrayed his country by making peace with Frederick the Great of Prussia, and thirdly that the country’s government had been mismanaged to the point where it was no longer effective.

  That evening, wearing the uniform of the Preobrazhenski Guards, and with her long flowing chestnut hair held in place by a sable-lined hat crowned with oak leaves, she mounted her white stallion, Brilliant, to ride back to Peterhof at the head of a troop of soldiers. On reaching the palace, she ordered that her husband Peter be arrested and placed under guard at Ropsha, a nearby estate. Six days later he was killed by Alexei Orlov.

  Catherine, denying all involvement in his death, declared he had died of colic. It is possible that he was poisoned, but the fact that she had his head and throat covered as he lay in state prior to his burial, suggests that he might have been strangled.

  Once in power the young empress, then a woman of thirty-four, proved herself an adept, though absolute, ruler. Catherine herself founded both schools and hospitals in the major cities of her realm. In doing so she was following the lead of her late husband’s grandfather, who, aware of the ignorance of the Russian physicians of his day, had first brought Scottish doctors to Russia, both to educate his own practitioners and to manage the hospitals that he built.

  A century had passed since Peter the Great, tsar of Russia 1682–1725, had made his epic journey to the west, returning convinced that the country’s future lay in conforming economically and culturally to the models of Western Europe. The first Russian ruler to leave his own country for more than 600 years, he had gone with the main purpose of learning how to build and crew ships with the object of establishing a navy in the Black Sea. Working himself as a shipwright in Amsterdam, he had helped to build a frigate which remained in service in the Dutch East India Company for many years. Crossing the North Sea to England, he had then learned more about ship-building at Deptford and increased his knowledge of arming warships at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. Most notably he had induced several hundred skilled craftsmen to return with him to Russia, including Professor Ferghasen of Aberdeen University, founder of the school of navigation in Moscow.

  In awareness of the medical ignorance of the Russian physicians of his day, he had also imported doctors, both to train his own practitioners and to manage the hospitals he had built, including one founded in Moscow in 1702, with a medical school attached.

  As well as building hospitals and encouraging foreign doctors to work in Russia, Catherine also founded the Medical Collegium in St Petersburg, the constitution of which also encompassed the Medical Chirurgical Academy, a combined civil body which controlled the whole medical profession. The joint functions of the two institutions included lecturing, examining and licensing, control of drugs, quarantine, vaccination, stipends and appointments. At the end of the 1790s the only Russian university was in Moscow. Four more would be established within the next decade, but only by passing a separate examination (as well as signing an affidavit not to poison the tsar) could students gain a licence to practise. Later James Wylie was to be president of the Academy for a period of thirty years.

  At that time the shortage of surgeons in Russia became even more acute, with the creation of numerous medical positions in the army and civil service. The situation was, indeed, so desperate that foreign emissaries of the royal court were instructed to look around for suitable doctors and entice them, with offers of financial reward, to come to Russia. Subsequently, thanks to the poverty that was rife in Scotland at the time, and to the undeniable lure of adventure, many Edinburgh University students seized on the chance to prosper overseas.

  Catherine imported so many doctors, principally from Britain, that a British doctor, returning from Russia near the end of the eighteenth century, reported that ‘Persons calling themselves English physicians are found in every town in Russia. Sometimes they have served in apothecary’s shops in Edinburgh and London, but are generally Scots apothecaries, who are men of professional skill and
acknowledged superiority.’5 Foremost among them in the early eighteenth century was Doctor Robert Keith Erskine of Alloa, who as Peter the Great’s personal physician had gone with him on his visit to the West. The sixth son of the Earl of Mar, who had led the Jacobite army in the Rising of 1725, Erskine was himself an ardent Jacobite who had found sanctuary in Russia.6

  On his arrival in Russia, James Wylie therefore found many compatriots who shared his profession. Among them was Doctor John Rogerson from Dumfries, attendant to the royal family; Doctor Robert Simpson, who, having joined the Scottish Admiral Greig’s fleet in 1774, was now chief surgeon to the naval hospital at Kronstadt; a Doctor Leighton, chief of the Naval Medical Services Department; and Doctor Alexander Crichton, head of the Civil Department of Medicine.7

  For ambitious and penniless young men, Russia was indeed a good place to find both advancement and fortune. Doctor Rogerson did so well for himself that he was able to retire back to Scotland to buy the estate of Wamphray and build the house of Dumcrieff in his native Dumfries-shire. Famously, Rogerson frequently received the gift of a snuff box from one of his grateful patients, which he then sold to a jeweller. The jeweller then resold it to the next noble patient, who felt himself indebted to his physician, and so the practice continued until it became so normal a transaction that the snuff box was handed over without a word being spoken or a bank note given in exchange!8

  As Wylie arrived in Russia, the war with Turkey, which had lasted for four years, was coming to an end. An attempt to drive the Turks from Europe had ended, after great loss of life, with a victory for Catherine’s General Potemkin as the sultan was forced to ask for peace. By the Treaty of Jassy, signed on January 1792 (Gregorian Calendar), Russia obtained all the territory between the rivers Bug and Dniester, the Crimea and Ochakov. However, although the whole north coast of the Black Sea now belonged to Russia, the sea itself remained closed to it because the Turks still controlled the southern straits. The Empress Catherine had failed in her ambition to take Constantinople, where she had planned to install the second eldest of her grandsons – in expectation of her triumph confidently christened Constantine – as king.

  Three months later, in March 1792, the King of Poland, who had already agreed to a treaty of mutual protection with Prussia, approved a new constitution. The Empress Catherine at once interpreted this as a manifestation of the same revolutionary spirit evinced by the Jacobins in Paris. On the strength of this, putting action to her words, she sent 64,000 Russian soldiers into Poland and another 32,000 into Lithuania. The Poles, in desperation, appealed for help from Prussia, but King Frederick William, despite the former agreement, now declared that he was not committed to defending a constitution drawn up in Poland without his knowledge.

  Further to this, in January 1793, the King of Prussia signed a pledge with Russia providing for a second partition. The Polish Diet, under armed threat, was forced to ratify a new treaty by the terms of which Russia took the northern regions of Poland, including Vilna, Minsk and Kiev, a region of 455,000 square kilometres in all. Prussia acquired Poznan, Danzig and part of Silesia, while Austria acquired some territory as well. The Empress Catherine, then triumphant, convinced she had subdued the radical element in Eastern Europe, concluded a treaty with Poland, which totally destroyed its independence by ensuring that all its governance would be managed henceforth from St Petersburg.9

  Although while at home in Scotland he had heard many travellers’ tales about Russia, nothing could have prepared James Wylie for life in the extraordinary country that was to be his home for the rest of his days. He discovered a land of unparalleled contrasts: on one hand poverty on a hitherto unimagined scale; on the other wealth and opulence, so flamboyant that it had to be seen to be believed.

  Appearance was all that mattered to the aristocratic families – or at least so it appeared. Status was judged by the number of servants in a household, in some of the greater palaces literally hundreds were employed. Nearly all were serfs, who although fed and housed, did not receive a proper wage. Competition raged as to who had the grandest carriages, the best bred horses, and as far as the women were concerned, the most opulent dresses and jewels. To Wylie, brought up in Protestant Scotland, where thrift was highly esteemed, it must have seemed that he had entered a new world, dictated by values that had previously been completely alien to him.

  The treatment of the soldiers themselves was but one example of the upper echelons of society’s total contempt for the common man. While there was no regular conscription, the tsar could command his nobles at will to provide serfs to fill the ranks of his army. These men, once in uniform, were treated little better than the horses for which many of them had to care, and they could be flogged to death without thought.

  When Wylie arrived in Russia, the Empress Catherine had been reigning for twenty-eight years. The slim young woman with her glorious chestnut hair who, astride her white thoroughbred, had led her deposed husband’s soldiers to Peterhof, was now gone. At sixty-one, and approaching old age, she had become squat and fat. Nonetheless she still held herself erect and little if anything escaped the imperious gaze of those wide-apart, brilliant black eyes.

  As tsarina, Catherine held absolute power over the 37 million inhabitants of the vast country of 8.75 million square miles over which she ruled. Of that number, only the aristocrats, who totalled a mere 2 per cent, lived in any kind of comfort. The peasants, who could be given away or sold at their owner’s whim, occupied the smoke-filled wooden or earthen huts of the villages, where they slept on a shelf above the stove in order to survive the winter months.

  There was much famine and much feasting. The peasants lived largely on cabbage soup and potatoes, but in years of bad harvests even these staple foods failed. Tolstoy has left a heart-breaking picture of a family dying of food poisoning from eating the rotten carcass of a sheep. Conversely, the nobles, who were largely great land owners, could lavishly entertain. In April 1792, the empress’s long enduring favourite and statesman, Prince Grigory Potemkin – her secret husband, or so it was believed – staged an enormous banquet in his palace of Taurida. Threatened by the ascendance of a rival for her favours, Potemkin pulled out all the stops to impress Catherine. Hundreds of actors, dancers and musicians were brought in to entertain. The empress, on arrival, walked between two rows of footmen in cream and silver livery, holding candelabras to light her way through the 3,000 guests who bowed at her approach. Potemkin himself, a one-eyed giant, looked magnificent in a scarlet coat embroidered with gold, over which was hung a long cloak of black velvet held in place with diamond clasps while his hat, too heavy with precious stones to wear, was carried behind him by a page.10

  Three months later, in July, Potemkin left St Petersburg to prepare for a war against Poland, but on reaching Jassy he caught malaria. Desperate to leave the disease-ridden city, while travelling over the steppes of Bessarabia he asked to be carried from his carriage and died by the side of the road.

  On 23 January 1793, Russia and Prussia signed the Second Partition of Poland, in which that country was reduced to only 200,000 square kilometres, containing a population of approximately four million people. The economy was ruined and support for a rising rapidly increased.

  The dissidents rallied under Thaddeus Kosciuszko. The son of a small Polish landowner, Kosciuszko had been educated in Paris, where he had become imbued with revolutionary ideals before going on to America where, in the Confederate army, he had risen to the rank of Brigadier.

  On 24 March 1794, in the market square of Cracow [Krakow], Kosciuszko swore an oath to liberate Poland, and the revolution against Russia began. Two months later, Kosciuszko, having been made commander-in-chief of the Polish–Lithuanian army, issued the famous Proclamation of Polaniec, famously promising freedom to the serfs who joined his rebellion. Despite initial successes, Kosciuszko was wounded in the battle of Maciejowice in 1794. Taken prisoner by the Russians, he was held in St Petersburg. His supporters fought on gallantly until they were
overwhelmed by Russian might in the Polish capital of Warsaw.

  Wylie is known to have been serving with his regiment at the siege of Warsaw in 1794. Commanded by General Suvorov, most brilliant of Catherine’s generals, the Russian army reached the outskirts of the city on 3 November. In darkness, at three o’clock the following morning they attacked. After four hours of desperate fighting in Praga, part of the eastern section of the city, the defenders were utterly defeated. Next day, after vicious looting by the Russians during which it has been estimated that 20,000 civilians were killed, the city surrendered. Suvorov, triumphant, sent a three-word message to the Empress: Hurrah – Praga – Suvoro, to which she replied: Congratulations – Field Marshal – Catherine.

  It was during this campaign that Wylie was horrified to find that it was only wounded officers who received medical attention. In most cases ordinary soldiers were simply left lying where they fell. But being a lowly army surgeon, he was incapable of doing anything to rectify what to him was an appalling situation. Nonetheless the young Scottish doctor, insignificant at that point as he knew himself to be, determined to target men of high rank as the means of gaining his end. Ambitious to the point where he believed that time and circumstance would work a transformation on his much-neglected profession, he swore that the day would come when he would be able to ensure that the scandalous cruelty and neglect of the common soldier in the field would be a thing of the past. Meanwhile he waited, with the tenacity of a true Scotsman, for the opportunity to increase his own influence to a degree that would give him the power of manipulating higher authority to achieve his goal.