Catherine the Great

Dr. Thomas Dimsdale was a Scot and a Quaker whose grandfather had accompanied William Penn to America in 1684. Thomas Dimsdale himself, now fifty-six, had a degree from Edinburgh University and had just published The Present Method of Inoculating for the Small Pox, describing his success and claiming to have minimized the risks. His book had gone through four editions in Britain, and Catherine, hearing about it, invited the author to St. Petersburg. Dimsdale arrived in Russia at the end of August 1768, bringing with him his son and assistant, Nathaniel. Catherine soon received them privately at dinner.

Dimsdale was charmed by Catherine, finding her, “of all that I ever saw of her sex, the most engaging.” He was amazed by “her extreme penetration and the propriety of the questions she asked relative to the practice and success of inoculation.” The empress, in turn, liked his common sense, but in her opinion, he was overly cautious. She smiled at his stumbling French and tried to understand his English. She told him that she had feared smallpox all her life, but now she wished to be inoculated as the best way of overcoming the fears of others about the disease and about inoculation. She wanted to be inoculated as soon as possible. Dimsdale asked to first consult her court physicians, but Catherine said that this was unnecessary. Dimsdale then suggested that, as a trial measure, he should first innoculate other women of her age; again, Catherine said no. Bowed by the responsibility, Dimsdale begged her to wait a few weeks while he experimented on several local youngsters. She reluctantly agreed, on condition that he keep his preparations secret. The official court register ignored Dimsdale’s presence entirely, although the British ambassador reported on August 29 that the empress’s intention “is a secret everybody knows. And which does not seem to occasion much speculation.” Finally, the empress and the doctor agreed on a date for inoculation: October 12.

Catherine stopped eating meat and drinking wine ten days before this date and began taking calomel, powder of crab’s claws, and a tartar emetic. At nine in the evening on October 12, Dimsdale inoculated Catherine in both arms with smallpox matter taken from a peasant boy named Alexander Markov, whom she subsequently ennobled. The next morning, Catherine drove to Tsarskoe Selo for rest and isolation. She felt healthy “except for some slight uneasiness” and exercised outdoors for two or three hours a day. She developed a moderate number of pustules that dried up in a week. Dimsdale pronounced the inoculation a success, and three weeks later Catherine resumed her regular schedule. She returned to St. Petersburg on November 1, and Paul was inoculated without difficulty the next day. Congratulated by the Senate and the Legislative Commission, she responded, “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.”

Catherine’s example was followed by 140 of the St. Petersburg nobility, including Gregory Orlov, Kyril Razumovsky, and an archbishop. Dimsdale then went to Moscow and inoculated another fifty people. A Russian translation of his treatise explaining his technique was published in St. Petersburg, and inoculation clinics were established in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Irkutsk, and other cities. By 1780, twenty thousand Russians had been inoculated; by 1800, two million. As a reward for his service, Catherine made Dimsdale a baron of the Russian empire and awarded him ten thousand pounds plus a life annuity of five hundred pounds. In 1781, Dimsdale returned to Russia to inoculate Catherine’s first grandson, Alexander.

Catherine’s willingness to be inoculated attracted favorable notice in western Europe. Voltaire compared what she had allowed Dimsdale to do with the ridiculous views and practices of “our argumentative charlatans in our medical schools.” At the time, the prevailing attitude toward the disease was fatalistic: people believed that, sooner or later, everyone must have it, and that some would survive and some would die. Most refused inoculation. Frederick of Prussia wrote to Catherine urging her not to take the risk. She replied that she had always been afraid of smallpox and wished more than anything to escape this fear. In May 1774, almost six years after Catherine was inoculated, smallpox killed the king of France. Louis XV took to bed a barely pubescent girl who was carrying smallpox. He died soon after, ending a reign of fifty-nine years. His successor, nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, was inoculated immediately.

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