The Tsar's Doctor (4 page)
Authors: Mary McGrigor
Wylie was greatly mortified by the lack of recognition which he genuinely believed he deserved. However, news then came that he had been awarded the degree of MD by the University of Aberdeen, on 23 December 1794, on the strength of which he resigned from the Russian army on 1 November 1795.
He then became medical attendant to the family of Prince B.V. Golitsyn, the Grand Duke Alexander’s (Catherine’s eldest grandson’s) greatest friend and confidant, as well as tutor to the son of a Colonel Fenshawe, one of the many mercenaries employed in the Russian army. In addition Wylie set up a private practice, first in Moscow, and then in St Petersburg.
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On 17 November 1796, the Empress Catherine collapsed from a stroke. Three days passed while those in the Winter Palace seemed to live in a time capsule of stunned immobility before she died.
Then, as though fired by an invisible hand, there was sudden hectic activity as the question of her successor was debated in muttered voices. Having long quarrelled with her eldest son, the Grand Duke Paul, the tsarina had wished her grandson, Alexander, to succeed her but had failed to alter her will accordingly. Therefore Alexander’s father, the mentally unstable Paul, became tsar of all the Russias.
Immediately life within the Winter Palace changed. The huge house echoed to the tramping of boots and jangling of spurs as soldiers from Gatchina, Tsar Paul’s estate, some twenty-five miles from St Petersburg, which, given to him by his mother he had run like an army barracks, came marching in to the building so recently hushed in sorrow following the empress’s death.
Once installed in the Winter Palace, the tsar stuck to his daily routine of watching platoons of his soldiers parade. Frederic Masson, a former tutor to Alexander, described how, even in the coldest weather, the tsar, ‘in a plain deep green uniform, great boots and a large hat’ watched his soldiers being drilled.
Surrounded by his sons and aides-de-camp he would stamp his heels on the stones to keep himself warm, his nose in the air, one hand behind his back, the other raising and falling a baton as he beat time, crying out ‘Raz, dva-raz, dva’ [one, two-one, two].
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Outside the palace was lined with armed sentries to the amazement of the populace, among whom rumours soon became rampant that an enemy was about to invade. Those in the Gatchina uniform included the Grand Duke Alexander who was now, on his father’s orders, reduced to the rank of sergeant. Elizabeth, his young wife, wept when she saw him so strangely dressed, but he had little time to comfort her as his father fired out orders commanding him to oversee the installation of the sentry boxes along the palace walls.
One of Tsar Paul’s first actions, on succeeding to the Russian throne, was to summon Colonel Alexei Arakcheev from Gatchina. This man, the son of a small provincial landowner, had proved himself so conscientious in the school of artillery that Paul had appointed him to teach the rudiments of military tactics to Alexander and Constantine, his eldest sons. Arakcheev, with his almost fanatical devotion to discipline, was later to prove a nemesis in Alexander’s life. Nonetheless, at this time, when all he had known at his grandmother’s court had vanished as if at the stroke of a sword, Alexander welcomed Arakcheev with tears.
So great was the new tsar’s hatred of his mother that he left her beloved summer palace of Tsarskoe Selo to lie empty in a state of neglect. The palace, designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in the 1750s, was one of the finest buildings of that age. Soon the empty rooms were filled with dust. Weeds rampaged over the beautiful English garden, embellished with the statuary Catherine had collected, where she had loved to sit, and the Catherine Park, named after her, grew wild as it was left abandoned to uncut shrubs and trees.
In increasing defiance of his mother’s rule, Paul had the embalmed body of his father, the ill-fated Peter III, disinterred from the monastery of Alexander Nevsky and transferred into an ornately decorated sarcophagus which was laid in state beside that of his mother, her complicity in his father’s death being one of the main reasons she was so detested by their son.
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The extent to which the new tsar’s mental health had deteriorated became rapidly more evident. Shortly after his succession, he forbade all imports of foreign books. Booksellers in both Moscow and St Petersburg were placed under police control, while in the cities themselves, people were arrested and searched without warrant as Paul declared police authority to be above the law.
Within the Winter Palace Paul’s courtiers and his family lived in a state of constant fear. The slightest thing annoyed him – the depth of a curtsey, the cut of a collar, even the angle of a hat.
He took particular pleasure in tormenting his sons’ young wives, especially Elizabeth, whose letters to her mother in Baden had to be smuggled out. He picked on her specifically when her sister became engaged to Gustav IV, the King of Sweden, who had jilted Paul’s own daughter, Alexandra, an unforgivable slight in his mind.
By the spring of 1800, Doctor Rogerson, his own physician, was thoroughly alarmed. ‘The cloud is darkening,’ he wrote. ‘The incoherence of his movements increases and becomes more manifest from day to day.’
All those within the Winter Palace, from his own family down to the lowest serf, lived in terror of the tsar. Even Count Kutaisof, the erstwhile barber, now transformed as the royal favourite, was terrified by his erratic moods. Soon afterwards, Doctor Rogerson, the kindly Scottish doctor who had known Alexander from birth, found the Grand Duke and his wife Elizabeth crying in each other’s arms. So great was their terror of his father that they could only confide to each other in whispers lying in bed at night.
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Unpredictable and terrifying as was Paul to his daughters-in-law, the behaviour of his wife, Maria Feodorovna, was almost as bad. A bully, she rejoiced in dominating the unfortunate young women who were married to her eldest sons. Made to scurry back and forth bearing messages and carrying out trivial orders, they were treated as inferior ladies-in-waiting and subjected to tiresome and often humiliating tasks. Possessive over Alexander, she particularly resented his obvious fondness for his wife, who was young and beautiful while Maria herself, after bearing nine children, had grown fat and was losing her looks.
Seizing every chance to degrade Elizabeth, Maria chose the day of Tsar Paul’s coronation in Moscow, in May 1797, to deliver one of her most hurtful jibes. Elizabeth, dressed by her ladies, had to present herself to her mother-in-law, to have her appearance approved. On impulse, she had pinned some lovely pink rosebuds to the diamond buckle of her sash. The Empress merely looked her up and down before, without a word, she pulled the roses from her buckle and threw them on the ground. ‘
Cela ne convient pas
’ (‘this is not suitable’) was her only bitter remark. Elizabeth blushed crimson, trying not to give the spiteful woman the pleasure of seeing her cry, while Alexander, who happened to be in the room, stood by helpless, too afraid of the consequences to interfere, although secretly nearly choking in his rage.
Highly excitable and unbalanced as he was, the tsar became frantic when told that Count Kutaisof, now ennobled as his closest friend and confidante, was gasping to death from a deep throat abscess. Doctor Rogerson was unable to save him, but James Wylie, hearing the case discussed among other doctors, said to one of them that he believed he might be able to help. When a member of his desperately anxious family heard of this, in defiance of protocol, and to the fury of the doctors attending him, Wylie was summoned to Kutaisof’s bedside.
Instantly assessing the situation, and to the amazement of those standing by, he at once performed the first laryngotomy operation ever seen in Russia. As the count began to breathe again and was obviously out of danger, the tsar, ecstatic in his gratitude, summoned Wylie to the Winter Palace the next day.
Such was the public sensation that, shortly afterwards, on the recommendation of Doctor Rogerson, Wylie was appointed court operator on 25 February 1798.
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The young Scotsman, forewarned of the emperor’s unpredictable moods, by now a major source of gossip in St Petersburg, attended the summons with excitement tinged with apprehension. Entering the huge, rambling building, he was conducted by an equerry through a maze of passages to the sovereign’s apartments. The first thing he heard, on reaching the door, was the clamorous barking of dogs. The tsar had a whole pack of various breeds which he treated like soldiers, the passion of his life, being known to beat some of them savagely whenever he felt a need to vent his wrath.
On coming into the bedroom, as the dogs sniffed round his feet, Wylie’s eye was caught by rows of tin soldiers, painted in uniforms of regimental colours. These he knew from hearsay to be the imaginary army with which the tsar still played, as he had done since childhood, lining them up for mock battles on the counterpane of his great imperial bed.
As Wylie, wearing the dark green uniform of the Eletsky Regiment, was ushered into his presence, the tsar, in that of the Imperial Guard, emblazoned with decorations and gold epaulettes, extended a hand for him to kiss. Speaking in French, the language of the court, this extraordinary man with the snub-nosed features, who was nonetheless one of the most powerful in the world, thanked him, with obvious sincerity, for saving the life of his friend. Wylie, his head bowed in acknowledgement, was then about to withdraw when, to his astonishment, he heard the tsar, his voice staccato with excitement, appoint him to his personal staff.
Instantly, as the tsar spoke, Wylie knew his life was about to change. He would now have a suite of rooms in the Winter Palace. He would no longer be a near nonentity, a junior member of a profession low in the social scale. Measuring his new appointment with Scottish shrewdness, he realized that if he played his cards carefully, he might rise to hitherto unimagined heights.
True to his steadfast roots, however, Wylie refused to have his head turned by this sudden change of events. A shy man by nature, and unmoved, at least outwardly, by his sudden rise in significance, he later belittled his achievements by claiming that he owed his rise in the hierarchy of the royal household to the cutting of Count Kutaisof’s throat.
James Wylie had become surgeon to the Russian court at a time when the mental instability of the Grand Duke Paul, eldest son of the Empress Catherine, was already causing great concern.
Count Feodor Rostopchin, a courtier to whom Tsar Paul, in his deluded state, was constantly turning for advice, writing to Count Simon Vorontzov, the Russian Ambassador in London, had told him that:
Next to dishonour, nothing could be more odious to me than Paul’s goodwill. The Grand Duke’s head is filled with phantoms, and he is surrounded by such people that the most honest man among them would deserve to be hanged without trial . . . One cannot see anything the Grand Duke does without being moved to pity and horror. One would think he was trying to invent ways to make himself hated and defeated . . . he seizes on anything and punishes indiscriminately. The least delay, the least contradiction, makes him beside himself and he flies into a rage.
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Wylie, in his new position, was soon to prove himself as much a psychiatrist as a doctor. The tsar, who was highly neurotic, swore he heard buzzing in his ears. Finding it useless to assure him otherwise, Wylie hit upon the ingenious idea of finding a bee (presumably a dead one) and inserting and extracting it, as though by sleight of hand, from one of the emperor’s ears. On seeing the insect, Paul was delighted. The buzzing had totally ceased. His genius of a physician had effected yet another miracle with his skill!
Wylie is known to have been in attendance when the tsar travelled to Moscow and then eastwards across Russia to Kasan, to see for himself the city which had been rebuilt by Catherine the Great after being destroyed in a revolt by the Cossack ataman Yemelyan Pugachev. It seems safe to imagine that it was during these journeys, when in constant close contact with Paul, that Wylie came to realize the extent of the tsar’s mental instability. It was also the time when he achieved increasing dominance over this sometimes violent and at all times sadly demented man.
Following his appointment as doctor to the tsar, the Medical College had confirmed Wylie’s qualifications as a doctor and surgeon in Russia, making him an honorary member.
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On 23 June 1799, he became Surgeon in Ordinary, and the extent of his hold over Paul is revealed by the fact that, in 1799, when the Military Medical Academy of St Petersburg was launched to train doctors for the army and navy, he became its first president. His work in the improvement of the Russian hospital system is described in the
British and Foreign Medical Review
Volume 1 (1836–47) and in
The Lancet
of 7 August 1897. Further to this, by 1800, he was taking a leading part in founding the Medical Chirurgical Academy in St Petersburg. Then on 16 March 1800 the Medical Collegium, despite their previous dismissal of his submission, confirmed him as a doctor of medicine on the basis of his doctoral diploma earned from Aberdeen University and in the same year elected him their honorary member.
Seen in hindsight it is hardly surprising that the sudden rise to eminence of the handsome, if rather forbidding, Scottish doctor sent tongues wagging in St Petersburg. Some were openly sarcastic. Throughout his career in Russia Wylie was to be plagued by the jealousy of some of his confederates, resentful that a foreigner should supplant them in the favour of the tsar.
Despite an embargo on shipping – the tsar, who was anxious to collude with the French, had barred British ships from the Baltic – word of Wylie’s rising predominance as physician to the royal family somehow filtered through to Scotland.