Eye - 29 June 2018

From blooming blossoms to a Quaker physician in Russia

The beauty of nature

Blossoming blooms have inspired Rosie Adamson-Clark, of Bolton Meeting. She told Eye about the burgeoning roses in her walled garden: ‘After four years of aphids, black spot, rust and mites on the roses and me spending hours chopping heads and leaves off, finally they look bloomin’ good! Nature is so uplifting, when the sky is grey, and the mood is low, and the world seems a place lacking in grace, justice and beauty… it is there right in front of us, the colours, the shapes and the smells of the garden flowers are energising! Love is all around us… as the pop song said!’ Rosie also shared a few lines of verse the flourishing flowers moved her to pen:

‘Here are some roses to lighten the day
Red lush flowers like velvet
and the scent of many perfumes
drifting across the lawn
as the bees and dragonflies dart this way and that.
 
God’s hand has created a wonderful vista.’

A cautionary tale

The plight of elders, overseers, clerks and trustees who have recently taken up their new responsibilities (and may be finding them less than straightforward) prompted Jamie Wrench, from Southern Marches Area Meeting, to send a cautionary tale to Eye. He writes: ‘I had this ditty on my wall at work, and found it comforting:

“They said the job could not be
done –

With a smile he went right to it;

He tackled that Job that Couldn’t
Be Done –

And couldn’t do it!”’

A plea, Eye discerns, for caution and restraint in ambition.

A great challenge and epic journey

The story of a Quaker physician’s extraordinary journey to the Russian royal court has been highlighted in Hertfordshire Life.

Sarah Bell, of St Albans Meeting, told Eye the tale of Thomas Dimsdale: ‘In 1768, 250 years ago, a Quaker doctor received a request from Catherine the Great to bring his cure for smallpox to Russia. He gained his reputation not from inventing the techniques but improving on them. Also, he was shrewd and published his findings, thus his name got known for this medical advance.

‘Catherine’s own insight into the disease, due to her husband being disfigured by it plus deaths in the royal court circle, no doubt spurred her on to seek him out when news of this doctor’s work reached her, via her London ambassador. He must have really sensed the great value in this bit of information, by choosing to bring it to her attention.

‘[It was] A case of shrewd thinking on his behalf, as well as Catherine’s, who was after dynastic protection, as France had lost heirs to their throne in living memory. In 1694, Mary II of England also died from it. 

‘Dimsdale needed two visits from court envoys plus a £1,000 payment [over £100,000 in today’s currency] before he travelled with his son, a medical student, to St Petersburg. The cost might seem vast, but a month’s travel across Europe would have been expensive and the possibility of not returning from such a mission may well explain the significant sum.

‘He was pricing his services at between twelve to fifteen times the average wage for a physician of his era but as he was offering a premium service for several months (he did not return until the following year) at some personal risk to his own and his son’s wellbeing – who are we to criticise?

‘Furthermore, his reputation was on the line and perhaps worse was possible as tsar Ivan III had executed two German doctors whose royal patients had died. Fortuitously, things went well [and] Dimsdale shared his knowledge with Russian doctors, thus helping to facilitate the better understanding… as well as treatment of this killer disease.’

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Comments

Dear Eye,
It’s good to see commemoration of Quaker Dr Thomas Dimsdale’s trip to Russia to inoculate Empress Catherine II against smallpox in 1768. Catherine was preceded by the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa, whose family was ravaged by the disease. In 1767 the Austrian Ambassador in London enquired about inoculation, and consequently King George’s own physicians were convened to find a suitable practitioner. A young doctor from the Austrian Netherlands, who had worked with Dimsdale, Jan Ingen Housz, was selected to go to Vienna where he inoculated the imperial family. So when the Russian Ambassador to London made similar enquiries in 1768, the field was prepared.  The recommendation of Dimsdale was apparently championed by the Quaker John Fothergill, later founder of Ackworth School, probably the Ambassador’s own physician. The inoculation of crowned heads became a matter of state, impinging on both domestic and foreign policy: Catherine had a coach and horses held in readiness in case something went wrong and Dimsdale had to make a quick exit. Nothing did, and Dimsdale was richly rewarded for his risky undertaking – Catherine gave him the title of Baron and a lot of money; on his return home he became a banker. Later on Dimsdale went back to Russia to inoculate Catherine’s grandchildren, the young grand dukes Alexander and Constantine. He took his third wife with him: her journal has been published—An English Lady at the Court of Catherine the Great. The Journal of Baroness Elizabeth Dimsdale, 1781, ed. A. G. Cross (1989). The good Baron found no Quaker difficulty with a noble title and additional wealth; later he also became a member of Parliament. In time, as sometimes happened with wealthy Quaker families, the Dimsdale Quaker connection was lost. Thomas’s current descendant, Robert (not a Quaker), has written an excellent account of inoculation practice in eighteenth-century Europe, including his ancestor’s part in it: http://www.sgecr.co.uk/dimsdale/article.html.
Roger Bartlett
Southern Marches AM

By Roger B on 29th June 2018 - 0:06

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