The Tsar's Doctor
Authors: Mary McGrigor
The Tsar’s Doctor
This eBook edition published in 2013 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
First published in 2010 by Birlinn Ltd
Copyright © Mary McGrigor 2010
The moral right of Mary McGrigor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-564-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-84158-881-0
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
To the memory of my friend and mentor Professor Alexander Adam FRCS, Honorary Librarian of the Aberdeen Medical Chirurgical Library, who suggested that I write this book
Contents
Prologue: The Man from America
6 ‘Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown’
12 Head of the Russian Military Medical Services
13 ‘Napoleon Thinks I Am No Better Than a Fool’
19 Celebration, Love and Sorrow
21 ‘The First Medical Person in the Russian Empire’
23 Rebuilding From the Ruins of the War
32 ‘Come on, my dear friend, I hope you are not angry with me.’
33 The Death Certificate of Doubt
Sir James Wylie Bt. Wearing his many decorations
Wylie’s coat of arms, designed by Alexander I
Empress Elizabeth, wife of Alexander I
Queen Louise, wife of King Frederick William III of Prussia
Maria Naryshkin, mistress of Alexander I
General Mikhail Kutuznov, commander of the Russian during the Napoleonic war
Mikhail Speransky, secretary to Alexander I
The Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlona, favourite sister of Alexander I
The Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna
Equestrian portrait of Alexander I by Franz Kruger
The only known portrait of Feodor Kuzmich
How do you write a biography of a man whose autobiography has been destroyed and who, in his native country of Scotland, is now all but forgotten?
This was the question I found myself faced with when attempting to research the life of Sir James Wylie, whose own carefully kept journal was obliterated on the order of Nicholas I, the last of the three Russian tsars to whom he was both doctor and friend.
Described as ‘the most famous Scotsman in Russian service . . . [whose] name is inseparably connected with the creation of the healthcare system in the Russian Army and Navy and with training of military surgeons’,
1
Sir James Wylie, as he eventually became, is today revered in Russia as the saviour of soldiers, their fate having been ignored before his time.
His statue, in St Petersburg, jerks memory alive. Yet his competence as a surgeon and administrator is shadowed by the mystery in which he was involved. Under pressure, and at the risk of his life, he perjured himself to sign the death certificate of one emperor, citing apoplexy instead of strangulation as the cause. Did he then, in later years, comply with the wish of another emperor to allow him to escape from the purgatory known to have eclipsed the reasoning of his mind?
No one will ever know, unless the discovery of new evidence brings proof of what actually happened, now nearly two centuries ago, in that remote little town of Taganrog by the Sea of Azov. Without it the events of the tragic interlude, in which Wylie was so deeply involved, must remain as mysterious as so many other incidents in the life of this incredible man.
Fortunately, although Wylie’s own reminiscences of his sixty-four years in Russia no longer exist, those of another doctor – an Englishman and contemporary of Wylie’s named Robert Lee – have survived.
It is in fact a miracle that Lee’s writings are still in existence, for he is openly, cruelly critical of both the Russian government and the tsars. Had it been found and read in Russia during his lifetime he would almost certainly have been imprisoned, if not sentenced to death. Nonetheless despite – and indeed partly because of – his abhorrence of the subjugation of the vast majority of the Russian people, his descriptions of the way they lived and of the country itself bring a vivid picture to the reader’s mind. It is therefore thanks to Lee’s diary that, in the absence of Wylie’s own account, an idea emerges of the vast areas over which he travelled, almost invariably with the tsar, a distance he claimed to be over 150,000 miles, and of the people with whom, over more than half a century, he became involved on both a social and professional basis.
The idea of writing about Wylie was suggested to me by my friend and mentor, the distinguished surgeon, Professor Alexander Adam FRCS, Honorary Librarian of the Medical Chirurgical Society of Aberdeen, and it was thanks to Prince Alexis Troubetzkoy, a descendant of one of the ‘Decembrists’ who died so bravely in freedom’s cause, that I discovered Wylie’s account of the last tragic days of Alexander I. Despite the fact that his memoirs were destroyed, Wylie did leave a diary, written in Russian, which was published as an article in the
Russkaya Starina
magazine. Jennifer Griffiths, Senior Library Assistant of the Taylor Institute Library in Oxford, most kindly sent me a photocopy. Doctor Kenneth Dunn, of the National Library of Scotland, then sent me an essay in German on Wylie’s medical practices, written on the bicentenary of his birth, by Professor Heinz Müller-Dietz. Both the Russian and German papers were translated by Dmitri Usenko, of Clearword Limited in Essex, while Caroline Roboc translated from the French.
Thus through the help of both friends and strangers I have traced the life of a reserved and inscrutable man, who today is still remembered in Russia as the champion and saviour of soldiers about whom nobody once cared. With contemporary accounts as my basis I have tried to penetrate the darkness surrounding the personality of this enigmatic Scottish doctor, who died with the secret of what really happened to Alexander I, the tsar whose death remains a mystery unsolved.
In the spring of 1854 Doctor William Channing, an American citizen by birth, arrived in the Russian capital of St Petersburg. He came with an introduction to a man famed in that city, a Scotsman named James Wylie, who had been created a baronet in his native land and who, in the capacity of personal physician, had served no fewer than three tsars in his time.
Channing was in a hurry. War between Russia and France, now allied to Britain, seemed imminent, and he might well have to leave quickly, supposing of course he could even find a ship to take him home.
For this reason he did not tarry in making his call on Sir James. With his letter of introduction in his pocket he hurriedly left his hotel, leaving his bags packed behind him in case it should prove necessary to make a speedy departure. A hired
drosky
took him through the city, past the buildings about which he had so often heard and read: the enormous Winter Palace fronting the River Neva, now surging brown with spring floods; the Mikhailovsky Palace on the opposite bank, where, as was now generally known, Tsar Paul I had been murdered over fifty years previously; the towering needle of the spire of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, burial place of the tsars; and the great church of St Isaac’s Cathedral, with its spectacular gilded dome, still in the final stages of construction,
The doctor noted the landmarks, pointed out by the bearded driver of the
drosky
with his whip. However, totally absorbed as he was with the prospect of what lay before him, he barely noticed his surroundings.
Would he be in time?
He had been told that Sir James was near his end. He willed the ancient horse to trot faster, but to no avail.
At last the
drosky
pulled up in front of a substantial house in a street called Galerney. The American tugged at the bell rope and heard it ring inside the building. Shortly after he hammered on the door, the bell having produced no response. Was he too late? Sir James Clark, the eminent London doctor who had given him a written introduction to his even more famous colleague in St Petersburg, had warned him of Wylie’s illness, calling him a very sick man. Was this apparently deserted mansion already a house of death?
Then from inside came the sound of shuffling and the door was pulled back a few inches to reveal a man, who by his dress and demeanour had to be a servant, standing with his hand upon the inside knob. The American explained his business and the man ushered him into a dark and very silent hall where he was respectfully asked to wait. The servant then disappeared into a nearby room in which he carried on a mumbled conversation with another man.
‘My master will see you now,’ announced the servant, coming back into the hall, and the American doctor then followed him into the room from which he had overheard the conversation taking place. The light, although brighter than that in the hall, was still dim, heavy curtains being only partly drawn. Channing could only just make out the figure of a very tall man, gaunt and grey with age, lying full length on a sofa with a rug covering his legs.