The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus
I remember hearing, as a young woman, the World Health Organisation’s announcement of the worldwide eradication of smallpox, and my mind going back to the sight of elderly beggars on the streets of Nairobi, faces cratered like the surface of the moon. Ending with the wide-scale vaccination programme for Covid-19, Ward traces the history of disease prevention back through Jenner’s discovery of vaccination – building on the triumphs of Thomas Dimsdale (the eponymous English Doctor) and his efforts to make inoculation widespread – to the folk-medicine practices that were taken up and used to such wonderful effect. For those, like me, who had forgotten the difference, inoculation is the introduction of a live, if mild, version of a disease into the body; vaccination uses dead or a much milder relative of the disease.
Dimsdale was not the first to recognise the life-saving properties of inoculation, but his respectability, the breadth of his practice amongst the trend-setting nobility, and above all his integrity in documenting and widely publishing his methodology made him a natural choice for Catherine the Great’s fight against the disease. Smallpox in Russia killed up to half of those infected, with many more blind or disfigured: a severe drain on the economy, quite apart from the suffering. Alone amongst the crowned heads of Europe, Catherine’s decision to be inoculated herself, and then for her heir to undergo the procedure, was a shining, life-saving example. The breadth of this book and its pace as we follow the politics of medicine in 18th century Europe makes it a fascinating, unmissable read, with its characters drawn broad across the page.
