Catherine the Great

Although she believed that she was healthier because she ignored physicians, she eventually agreed to keep a personal doctor at court. She chose a young Scotsman, Dr. John Rogerson, of Edinburgh University. Still convinced that she had no need of him, she made him the butt of jokes about modern medicine and liked describing him to others as the kind of medical charlatan found in Molière. “You couldn’t cure a flea bite,” she would say to him. Rogerson would laugh and continue to urge her to take the pill he was offering. When he succeeded, he would pat the empress on the back and say jovially, “Well done, ma’am! Well done!”

There was no joking, however, when Catherine confronted one of the most serious diseases afflicting her contemporary world: smallpox. Here, the imperial family had no greater protection than the poorest peasant. The boy emperor Peter II had died of the disease at fifteen. Empress Elizabeth’s Holstein fiancé, Catherine’s uncle, had been carried off on the eve of their marriage. Nor could Catherine forget the suffering and disfigurement of her husband, the future Peter III. She considered herself fortunate in having reached adulthood without contracting the pox, but she knew that this reprieve might not last.

The devastating smallpox experience being inflicted on the Hapsburgs frightened Catherine. In May 1767, Empress Maria Theresa and her daughter-in-law, Maria Josepha, the wife of her son and heir, Joseph II, both contracted smallpox. Five days later, Maria Josepha died; Maria Theresa recovered but was scarred. Her widower son, Joseph II, refused to marry again and had no surviving children. The following October, Maria Theresa’s daughter, also named Maria Josepha, died of smallpox; two other Hapsburg daughters had the disease but survived, with prominent scars. This succession of tragedies convinced Maria Theresa to have her three youngest children inoculated.

Aware of these personal and dynastic tragedies, Catherine worried about the threat of smallpox to Paul as much as to herself. She knew that the court was never free of talk about the grand duke’s uncertain chance of succession, because he had not yet faced and defeated the disease. She and Panin worried constantly about the boy’s possible exposure. They sought to isolate Paul from crowds and from anyone who was or might be afflicted. Paul chafed at the restrictions put on him. At twelve, he was asked whether he would attend a masquerade. He replied,

You know I am a child and cannot be supposed to be a judge whether I ought to go there or not, but I will wager that I do not go. Mr. Panin will tell me that there is a great monster called Smallpox, walking up and down the ballroom. This same monster has very good foreknowledge of my movements for he is generally to be found in precisely those places where I have the most inclination to go.

The disease came close to Catherine and Paul in the spring of 1768 when Nikita Panin’s fiancée, Countess Anna Sheremeteva, described by a British diplomat as a woman of “uncommon merit, beautiful, and immensely rich,” was struck by smallpox. At Tsarskoe Selo, the empress waited anxiously. When, on May 5, she learned that Panin himself had been placed in quarantine for two weeks, she secretly ordered Paul brought to her. “I am very upset,” she said, “not being able to focus on anything better, for everything is awful in this critical situation.” Paul arrived at Tsarskoe Selo on May 6, and mother and son waited together. Catherine herself was ill on May 14 and better the next morning; she quickly informed Panin of her overnight recovery and passed along her doctor’s assurance that “these difficult days for your fiancée will pass.” Two days later she was told that Countess Sheremeteva was dead. “Having this hour learned of the demise of Countess Anna Petrovna, I could not help letting you know my real sorrow,” she wrote to Panin on May 17. “I am so touched for you by this grievous misfortune that I cannot sufficiently explain it. Please watch your own health.” She spent seven weeks at Tsarskoe Selo, and for the rest of the summer, she and Paul moved between country estates to avoid crowds.

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Fear for herself, her son, and the nation prompted the empress to investigate a new, controversial method of inoculation that assured permanent immunity: the injection of matter taken from the smallpox pustules of a patient recovering from a mild case. This medical technique was being used in Britain and the British North American colonies (Thomas Jefferson was inoculated in 1766) but was shunned in continental Europe as being too dangerous.