‘My objective was, through my example, to save from death the multitude of my subjects.' Photo: by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
Beside the point: How did a Quaker doctor come to inoculate the empress of Russia? by Rebecca Hardy
‘Some persons of the highest rank would probably be the subject of my trip.’
Friends going for Covid jabs probably won’t have seen any getaway cars parked outside, engine running, for volunteers ready to scarper. But this was the case 250 years ago for the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale, who inoculated Catherine II, empress regnant of all Russia, against smallpox in 1768. So risky was the procedure that Catherine (known as ‘the Great’ to those who like titles) is purported to have had a relay of horses waiting outside the palace, just in case the secret procedure went horribly wrong and she was accidentally killed. Fearing the wrath of her angry courtiers, she arranged for a carriage to be waiting to whisk the Quakers away.
It wasn’t so implausible. In those days, inoculation was a dicey business, consisting of slicing two or three times into a patient’s arm and then grafting in pustules from a smallpox patient. This rather crude practice was based on the method brought from the Ottoman empire to England in 1718 by Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador in Constantinople. She had successfully had her own children inoculated (despite being dubbed an ‘annoying woman’ at the time, according to a new biography about her). In Catherine’s case, the pus was taken from a six-year-old boy who was transported through a secret passage to Catherine’s chambers. An infected lymph was then transferred from the boy to the empress’s arm, before she was whisked away to her palace, with Thomas following behind.
‘The night after the vaccination, the Empress slept well, there was slight pain and the pulse accelerated,’ Dimsdale documented in his journal. ‘The overall condition is excellent. The food consisted of stew, vegetables and some chicken meat.’
On 18 October, Catherine went on to first feel fever and then lose her appetite, followed with smallpox pustules forming on her body. But by October 28 she had recovered and, on 1 November, Catherine was back in St Petersburg, basking in the congratulations of her court. Her son Paul was also successfully vaccinated, and Thomas Dimsdale could breathe a sigh of relief.
Dimsdale was paid handsomely for his work, and, after arriving in Moscow and vaccinating around 140 members of her court, he left Russia loaded with extravagant artworks from grateful nobles. Catherine not only lavished the doctor with diamonds and furs, as well as £12,000 and a life annuity of £500, but rewarded him with a hereditary barony of the Russian Empire, which is still held by the family. He arrived in England a very rich man and promptly opened a smallpox inoculation clinic and a bank (a forebear of Nat West). Now enjoying an internationally-renowned reputation, Dimsdale would go down as one of the pioneers of inoculation. He was also elected twice as MP for Hertford. But what is perhaps less well known is that he arguably paved the way for Quakers to create networks with tsarist Russia. This was consolidated when Dimsdale returned to Russia to vaccinate Konstantin and Alexander, Catherine’s grandsons. But who was Thomas Dimsdale, and why was he chosen to inoculate the empress Catherine?
Thomas was born in 1712 in Theydon Garnon, Essex, and was one of several generations of Dimsdale doctors. According to the Epping Quakers’ website, Thomas was the grandson of Robert Dimsdale, a surgeon and doctor who may have been among the group that helped build the first Meeting house in Epping. Robert also travelled to the USA with William Penn in 1684.
According to Paul Ailey’s website on Bishop Stortford history: ‘When William Penn made a return trip to America in 1684, he was joined by a Quaker convert named Dr Robert Dimsdale. He was originally from Hertford but on his return to England chose to settle in Bishop’s Stortford. The family seems to have been unique at producing doctors; the town of Hertford at that time had at least one Dr Dimsdale and at other times as many as three.’ The website also reveals that a series of Dimsdale doctors also served Bishop’s Stortford throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘The Dimsdale family had been Quakers since the start and became leading figures in the Bishop’s Stortford Meeting House shortly after it was founded,’ says the website. ‘William Dimsdale, surgeon, was one of the trustees.’
A fellow of the Royal Society and holder of a medical degree from Aberdeen, Thomas Dimsdale seems to have kept the family practice in Hertford going, where he worked on smallpox inoculation, publishing a treatise in 1766 which was translated into several languages and circulated around Europe. It was this that caught the attention of the Russian ambassador, who had been instructed by Catherine to find someone to carry out her desired inoculation.
The Library of the Society of Friends’ ‘Quaker Strongrooms’ blog says that Catherine first heard about Dimsdale when her Russian ambassador approached the Quaker scientist John Fothergill for recommendations. ‘Quakers used their network of connections to gain [Fothergill’s] advice,’ says the blog, which shows a missive from Fothergill replying to ‘his friend Mark Beaufoy, who had forwarded him a letter from William Phillips of Redruth, Cornwall on behalf of one J Higman’. Fothergill’s prescription to the mystery ailment was, intriguingly, ‘tar water, dandelion sap and sea-bathing’.
Like much of Europe, Russia was being ravaged with a smallpox epidemic. Tens of thousands had been killed in Siberia alone in 1767, so Catherine was desperate for a solution. A lover of modern science, smallpox was something that the notoriously-brave Catherine genuinely feared. She had never had childhood smallpox, so had never developed an immunity, and her husband Peter’s health had been irreversibly damaged by the disease when he was a young boy. Despite it not being captured in his official portraits, Peter’s face was reputedly pockmarked and unattractive.
‘I had been taught from childhood to be terrified of smallpox and at a more mature age it cost me a great deal of effort to reduce this horror,’ Catherine wrote in a private letter to Friedrich, then king of Prussia. Her fears were made worse by the fact that one of her ladies-in-waiting had recently died from the disease.
On hearing about Dimsdale’s work, it didn’t take long for Catherine to instruct the Russian envoy in England to send for him, and he was invited to Russia. ‘I was given to know by hints that, in addition to the benefits of the entire empire from this invitation, some persons of the highest rank would probably be the subject of my trip’, Dimsdale later wrote. When he arrived at St Petersburg with his son Nathaniel, they found a hospital organised in one of the city houses, equipped with the basics needed for inoculation. The empress refused Dimsdale’s offer to first test his method on women of her age and stature, saying it would take too much time. Dimsdale did inoculate a few cadets but none of the experiments were successful. Then suddenly Catherine demanded that he vaccinate her immediately.
Such was the success of Catherine’s procedure that a mass programme was rolled out, which saw two million Russians inoculated by the end of the century. Catherine later said: ‘My objective was, through my example, to save from death the multitude of my subjects who, not knowing the value of this technique, and frightened of it, were left in danger.’
A lover of the Enlightenment, Catherine had no time for eighteenth-century ‘anti-vaxers’, and, in a letter to her friend Voltaire, branded them ‘truly blockheads, ignorant or just wicked’. As for Thomas Dimsdale, after inoculating Catherine and the Russian court, he conducted a pamphlet debate throughout the 1770s with another Quaker doctor called John Coakley Lettsom who proposed inoculating the poor at their own houses. Dimsdale also opened an inoculation house ‘for persons of all ranks in the neighbourhood of Hertford, which was used with great success’. In 1781, he printed the widely-distributed but never sold ‘Tracts on Inoculation’, and in June the same year, the physician was invited back to Russia to inoculate Catherine’s youngest grandson, the crown prince Alexander. Together with his third wife, Elizabeth, Dimsdale set sail from Dover and stayed in Russia until the end of November, with Elizabeth recording her impressions of their stay to be later published as the book English Lady at the Court of Catherine the Great: The journal of Baroness Elizabeth Dimsdale, 1781.
Elizabeth is thought to have established close links with the royal family, with Alexander rumoured to have nicknamed her ‘his Quaker mother’. It was from this that Alexander’s lifelong connection with Quakerism is thought to have begun. According to the Quakers in the World website, out of all the Quaker connections with Russians up to that date – which, admittedly, were limited – inoculating Alexander was ‘probably the most far-reaching of all’, and played a pivotal role in establishing links between Quakers and tsarist Russia.
In 1814, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, Alexander made ‘a triumphal visit’ to his allies in Britain. ‘Russia had suffered terribly at Napoleon’s hands… but the tide had turned and Alexander had recently marched into Paris. He came to London to find out more about new thinking and new technologies’, says the blog, which goes on to describe how Meeting for Sufferings had prepared a message for Alexander and charged William Allen and Luke Howard with delivering it. ‘Before they had arranged this, Alexander asked Allen to take him to a Quaker meeting. The tsar’s command of English was good, and he was impressed. He had many questions to ask when he met Allen, Stephen Grellet and others some days later, and they also discussed practical matters such as farming methods, and the Lancastrian education system. These discussions led to the introduction of the Lancastrian system into Russia, and to Daniel Wheeler spending fifteen years (1717-32) reclaiming the St Petersburg marshes. When Allen and Grellet visited in 1818-19 they saw these initiatives at first hand, as well as visiting prisons, hospitals, and farms. They met the tsar several times, and discussed what they had seen with him.’
The visit is also documented on the Friends House in Moscow website, which describes it as the first significant contact of Quakers with Russian society. In 1814, ‘Alexander, by then a strong evangelical Christian, twice attended Quaker meetings for worship, and on his return journey to the coast stopped to talk – to their great surprise – with a Quaker family he noticed on the way. He conceived a very high opinion of Quakers. It should be said that by this time, the early nineteenth century, English Quakerism had evolved considerably from its revolutionary roots.’
According to Friends House in Moscow, Quakers viewed Alexander as ‘a vessel of the Holy Spirit, a channel for true Christianity in the East of Europe, and had great hopes of him. They were particularly interested, too, in the philanthropic activities which developed in Russian high society at this time, under the patronage and with the active participation of the Imperial family.’
British Quakers later visited Alexander, and Daniel Wheeler’s feat of draining 105,700 acres of the St Petersburg marshes is depicted in the Quaker Tapestry, alongside the words: ‘God’s love enableth me to call every country my country and every man my brother.’
According to the Quakers in the World blog, Daniel Wheeler, who joined the society in 1797, knew he would soon be called to overseas missionary work and ‘suddenly knew it would be St Petersburg, when he watched his small son struggling with a jigsaw puzzle depicting a map that included that city’. In June 1817 he travelled to Russia and presented his plan to Alexander, who was looking for someone to clear the marshes and trusted Quakers. He also gave him a document outlining Quaker principles. The tsar was impressed, and the two became good friends until Alexander died in 1825.
After Alexander’s death, his successor Nicholas I took little interest in Wheeler’s work and the connection with British Quakers dimmed. But much good work had come from that first dangerous inoculation of Catherine, before she was bundled off to her private palace. Today, Thomas Dimsdale is buried in the old Quaker burial ground, now a public garden in Bishop’s Stortford, gifted to the town by Friends in 1935.
One final, tantalising question emerges from this story. Did Quakers create one of the earliest doughnuts? Elizabeth Dimsdale didn’t only write about the Russian court. On returning to the UK she penned a cookbook that includes a recipe for ‘dow nuts’.
The recipe was recently passed on to the Hertfordshire Record Society by a certain Robert Dimsdale. Was the recipe inspired by the (no pun intended) ‘holy’ bread she had sampled at empress Catherine’s royal court? Friends: watch this space.
Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend.
