The Tsar's Doctor (28 page)

Is this the voice of truth, or rather the jibes of colleagues whose jealousy remained unquenched? Certainly it must be remembered that even Doctor Lyall, while deriding Wylie’s capabilities as a doctor, nonetheless admitted that none did more for the Russian soldier than he.

Wylie’s undying attachment to Alexander seems, in fact, to have been based on a near paternal relationship with a man so vulnerable to depression and illness as to be almost dependent on his support. Over and above this, despite his human weaknesses, and perhaps because of the courage with which he faced the demons besetting his mind, Wylie greatly admired the emperor to whom he became indispensable both as physician and friend.

Wylie was by then known to be eccentric, careful with his money and fiercely protective of his privacy. Suffice it to say that, at least when living in the Winter Palace, he was perfectly happy with the company of his dogs, existing, when not asked out to dine, on black bread and salt. Respected and to some extent feared in old age, he died with the secrets of his own life, and the knowledge of what really happened to Emperor Alexander whose trust, under no circumstances, would he ever betray.

He certainly had planned at one point to return to Scotland for at least part of the year. His great-niece testifies to his having been ‘seized in a tenement of houses in Kincardine in April 1823 belonging to the sequestered estate of George Millar, shipmaster, to whom he had given two loans of £150 each’. Confirming his intentions he had asked Mr Edward, a Dundee merchant, husband of his niece, who came to visit him in Russia in June 1839, ‘to look out for a suitable property’. He had, he assured him, ‘no desire to leave Russia and return permanently to Scotland’ but wished to have a home in his native land where he could enjoy ‘a month or two of sport in an interesting district’. He thought of buying Harviestoun Estate, near Dollar, and actually began negotiations for purchasing Glenogil near Kirriemuir, the difficulty being that he did not want a large house, ‘knowing from experience that such is the cause of considerable annoyance and anxiety’, as he told his niece. Nevertheless, planning to buy land in Scotland he invested £50,000 in British bonds at 3 per cent in order to have money readily available.

Mrs Edwards, to whom he spoke with great affection of his relatives in Scotland, was obviously a favourite among them. Her uncle gave her a valuable diamond ring, which he himself had been given by Catherine the Great, while her husband departed with a Siberian topaz and a seal that had been presented to the doctor by Emperor Alexander. Later Mrs Edwards was to receive a very fine Persian cloak, a pocket Bible which his mother had given him, his portrait and one of the medals that had been struck on the orders of Tsar Nicholas on the occasion of celebrations in St Petersburg to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Wylie’s service under the Russian government.

Two sons of his eldest brother William (the schoolmaster in Dundee) who went out to visit their uncle in Russia prospered greatly, while William’s grandson (son of the minister of Carluke whom Wylie had tried to persuade to return with him to Russia) ‘was for many years one of the most respected citizens of St Petersburg’. It would seem that it was William, father of Wylie’s great-niece, who, ‘when a sailor boy in St Petersburg’, was given ‘a large silver pen and pen holder which combined a mathematical instrument’,
¹⁰¹
and David Wylie, a son of Sir James’s brother Robert, died in Moscow in 1836.
¹⁰²

Sir James Wylie, who died aged eighty-six, was buried in the Volchoff burial ground in St Petersburg. While his nephew George was the chief mourner, his funeral was attended by the tsar and all the members of the court, regardless of the fact that war between Russia and Wylie’s native country was just about to be declared. Having never married he left no direct descendants, but the money he had invested in British bonds, with the idea of buying an estate in Scotland, was eventually divided among his relations. A case raised in the Court of Chancery by Walter, his only surviving brother, decreed that under British law this money could not be alienated to a foreign power.

The residue of his fortune, valued at 1.5 million roubles, however, went to the Emperor Nicholas and the Russian nation specifically for the building of ‘a large hospital at St Petersburg to be attended by the pupils of the Medico-Chirurgical Academy’.
¹⁰³

Five years after his death, when the Christmas Day of 1859 fell on the seventy-ninth anniversary of the enrolment of the young doctor from Scotland to the Eletsky Regiment, a monument in the courtyard of the Wylie Clinical Hospital was dedicated to his memory. It shows him sitting on a rock, in the parade uniform of an army surgeon, with his book on ‘Military Pharmacy’ at his feet. In his left hand he holds a paper scroll; in his right a pencil. The statue, cast in bronze, stands on a pedestal of black Finnish marble carved with emblems of Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health. One of the four sides shows Wylie’s coat of arms, designed for him by Tsar Alexander himself. Another is a representation of the first meeting of the academy, a third depicts him saving wounded on the battlefield, and a fourth bears the dedicatory inscription.

The Mayakovskaya Hospital, built to Wylie’s memory with the money he had left, was opened in 1873. Designed in the shape of a W in his honour, it contained 150 beds of which 120 were free and the remainder for paying patients. Today the hospital holds departments of haematology and clinical immunology, with the clinical oncology of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma increasingly significant.

And so in Russia the doctor from Scotland, so largely forgotten in his own country, is remembered not only as a medical pioneer and personal physician to three tsars, but as the man who, by introducing field hospitals, saved thousands of soldiers from dying untended on the battlefields, as Russia fought for survival against Napoleon’s might.

Envoi

Less than a year had passed since the death of Sir James Wylie when, on 24 February 1855, the news of his army’s disasters in Eupatoria reached Tsar Nicholas I. According to Doctor Mandt, the tsar’s new personal physician, this ‘stunned him and struck the fatal blow. ‘‘How many lives sacrificed in vain!’’ he murmured sadly while speaking of his poor soldiers.’

From that moment on, according to his doctor, the tsar refused to eat, and handed over almost all of his responsibilities, particularly those not concerned with the army, to his eldest son, the Grand Duke Alexander. Very shortly after this he developed a cold that turned into influenza. However, none of Doctor Mandt’s warnings that it was dangerous would stop him from going out, wearing only an overcoat, to the huge and draughty riding school to review and say farewell to a detachment of Guards Infantry about to leave for Lithuania.

The result, as Mandt had predicted, was that his virus turned into pneumonia. He asked several of his generals to come and say goodbye to him and begged the tsarevich to say goodbye for him to the Guards, the army and, above all, to the heroic defenders of Sevastopol. ‘Tell them that in the other world I will continue to pray for them. I have always striven to work for their good. If it has not always succeeded, it was not for lack of goodwill, but for want of knowledge and ability. I beg them to forgive me.’
¹⁰⁴

Nicholas I died on the morning of 4 March 1855. Inevitably rumours spread that he had poisoned himself with Mandt’s assistance, but as in the case of his brother’s death, there is no concrete evidence to support these claims. Nicholas was born in 1796, at much the same time as a young James Wylie had become his father’s personal physician. He did at least reach his sixtieth year, a lifespan twelve years longer than that of the brother he had succeeded to the throne.

Nicholas’s dying wish that his soldiers should be cared for was in part carried out by his sister-in-law, the Grand Duchess Elena, wife of his youngest brother Michael, who although unhappily married, or perhaps as a result of this, became as dedicated as Florence Nightingale, saviour of British soldiers, to nursing the sick and wounded Russians on the battlefield.

Therefore, it must be said that the human suffering and loss of life resulting from nineteenth-century European wars did at least bring enlightenment to medical practice regardless of the nationality of the doctors and nurses whose dedication saved the lives of these hitherto neglected men.

Notes

1.
Müller-Dietz, H.,
J. Wylie and the Medico-Chirurgical Academy in St Petersburg
, p. 15.

2.
Meiklejohn, The Rev. William,
Tulliallan: Four Lads o’ Pairts
, p. 1.

3.
Sheriff Court Records of Clackmannan.

4.
Müller-Dietz. H., p. 1

5.
Meiklejohn, Rev. W., p. 15, note 7.

6.
Ibid., p. 2.

7.
1996
Scottish Medical Journal
.
Paper by A.A. Novik, V.I. Mazurov & P. d’A Semple. ‘The Life & Times of Sir James Wylie Bt., MD., 1768–1854’.

8.
Doctor Clarke’s Travels in Russia, Tartary and Turkey.

9.
Troyat, Henri.
Catherine the Great
, pp. 319–20.

10.
Troyat, Henri, p. 311.

11.
A lithotomy is a surgical procedure for removing stones from organs such as the bladder or kidney.

12.
Müller-Dietz. H., p. 2.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Masson. F.,
Memoirs of Catherine II and the Court
, pp. 145–8.

15.
Palmer, A.,
Life of Alexander I
, p. 30.

16.
Almedingen, E.M.,
The Emperor Alexander I
, p. 60.

17.
Appleby, John H.,
Through the Looking-Glass: Scottish Doctors in Russia (1704–1854)
, pp. 60-61.

18.
Troyat, H.,
Catherine the Great
, pp. 322–3.

19.
Appleby, J.H., p. 61.

20.
Meiklejohn, Rev. W., p. 15.

21.
Tooke,
Life of Catherine II
, Vol.1.

22.
Palmer, A., p. 45.

23.
Joyneville, C.,
Life and Times of Alexander I
, Vol. III, p. 364.

24.
Palmer, A., p. 65.

25.
Palmer, A., p. 102.

26.
Palmer, A., p. 109.

27.
Guthrie, Matthew,
Supplementary Tour
, p. 48.

28.
Palmer. A., p. 138.

29.
Almedingen, E.M.,
The Emperor Alexander
, p. 101.

30.
Müller-Dietz, H., p. 3.

31.
Adam, A.,
FRCS. Aberdeen Royal Infirmary
, ed I. Levack and H. Dudley, 1992.

32.
Thomson, Anthony Todd.
Elements of Materia Medica and Therapeutics
.

33.
A verst = 3,500 yards, or about three quarters of a mile.

34.
Palmer, A., p. 203.

35.
Lieven, D.,
Russia against Napoleon
, p. 157.

36.
Ibid., p. 186.

37.
Tolstoy, L.,
War and Peace,
Part 2
, p. 902.

38.
Palmer, A., p. 248.

39.
Palmer, A., p. 253.

40.
Lieven, D., p. 286.

41.
Palmer, A., p. 260.

42.
Meiklejohn, the Rev. W., p. 6.

43.
Müller-Dietz, H., p. 3.

44.
Lieven, D., p. 416.

45.
Fremont-Barnes, Gregory.,
The Napoleonic Wars
, (4), p. 48.

46.
Palmer, A., p. 273.

47.
Lieven, D., p. 143.

48.
Joyneville. C., Vol III. p. 26.

49.
Meiklejohn, Rev. W., p. 9.

50.
Meiklejohn, Rev. W., p. 16.

51.
Palmer, A., pp. 296–7.

52.
Ibid., p. 298.

53.
Müller-Dietz, H., p. 7.

54.
Novik, Mazurov, Semple, p. 119

55.
Schuster, Norah H.,
Paper Records of British Medical Society
, Vol. 61, February 1968, p. 185.

56.
Palmer, A., p. 319.

57.
Palmer, A., p. 324.

58.
Joyneville, C., p. 196.

59.
Palmer, A., p. 332.

60.
£1 = approximately 473 roubles.

61.
Novik, Mazurov, Semple, p. 118.

62.
One rouble is divided into 100 copecks (kopeks).

63.
Meiklejohn, Rev. W., p. 7.

64.
Lyall, Robert,
Travels in Russia, the Crimea, the Caucusus, and Georgia
, Vol. II. pp. 425–6.

65.
Meiklejohn, Rev. W., p. 5.

66.
Ibid., p. 114.

67.
Novik, Mazurov, Semple, p. 117.

68.
Palmer, A., p. 344.

69.
Almedingen, E.M., p. 175.

70.
Almedingen, E.M., p. 181.

71.
Joyneville, C., p. 275.

72.
Pope-Hennessey, Una,
Alexandra Memoir
, pp. 44–5.

73.
Palmer, A., p. 166

74.
Joyneville, C., p. 318.

75.
Lee, Doctor R., ‘The Last Days of Alexander I and the First Days of Nicholas I’ Item 206.

76.
Palmer, A., p. 382.

77.
Palmer, A., p. 77.

78.
Joyneville, C., p. 347 (footnote).

79.
Troubetzkoy, A.S.,
Imperial Legend
, p. 126.

80.
Russkaya Starina
magazine, Vol. 73 (1892), p. 79.

81.
Magazine editor suggests Severski.

82.
Lee, R., p. 15.

83.
This is the second time that Alexander’s fondness for Scottish reels, presumably taught to him by Wylie, is mentioned.

84.
Ibid., p. 27.

85.
The castle built at Alupka, in both English and Gothic style, now an art gallery and museum, and where Winston Churchill stayed during the Yalta Conference, was at that time only being planned.

86.
Over four miles.

87.
From
Russkaya Starina
, Vol. 3 (1892), p. 79.

88.
Alexander I was born on 12 December 1777 (Julian calendar).

89.
Appleby, J.,
The Caledonian Phalanx, Scots in Russia
, p. 63.

90.
Lee, R., p. 66.

91.
Troubetzkoy, A.S., p. 191.

92.
Troubetzkoy, A.S., p. 192.

93.
Troubetzkoy, A.S., pp. 246–7.

94.
Ibid.

95.
Lee, R., p. 125.

96.
One wonders if she made them stop to see it!

97.
Meiklejohn, Rev. W., p. 12.