'As the first reigning European monarch to volunteer herself—as well as her offspring—for inoculation, Catherine the Great was taking a brave step and a calculated risk
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskSo recounted Donald Hopkins in his encyclopedic history of the disease, “Princes and Peasants”, published in 1983. Now Lucy Ward has zoomed in on one of the more dramatic episodes in that dramatic century, blowing it up to book length. Whether it merits retelling in such detail is debatable, but Catherine the Great of Russia’s decision to get both herself and her son inoculated certainly resonates in these contagious times.
Smallpox at that time was often lethal. When it did not kill, it could blind or disfigure. So when, in 1768, the English doctor Thomas Dimsdale was summoned to St Petersburg to do the honours, he had understandable qualms about the assignment. Catherine assured him that a yacht would be standing by in the Gulf of Finland, ready to whisk him out of Russia should anything go wrong.
Ms Ward’s vivid and well-told story raises the interesting question of who deserves credit for inoculation. The aristocratic Mary Wortley Montagu had brought it back to England earlier in the century, having seen elderly Turkish women perform it on her travels. English medics then modified it—making it more rather than less dangerous.
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