The Empress and the English Doctor
How Catherine the Great defied a deadly virus
by Lucy Ward
Within living memory, smallpox was a dreaded disease. Over human history it has killed untold millions. In the eighteenth century, as epidemics swept Europe, the first rumours came from Turkey of a weapon against the virus: a mysterious technology called inoculation.
But a key problem remained: convincing people to accept the preventative remedy, the forerunner of vaccination. Arguments raged over risks and benefits, and public resistance ran high. In Russia, as smallpox threatened her court and ravaged her empire, Catherine the Great took the momentous decision to summon the Essex-born Quaker physician and inoculator Thomas Dimsdale to St Petersburg to carry out a secret mission that would transform both their lives and bond them forever in a lifelong friendship.
Lucy Ward expertly unveils an extraordinary story of Enlightenment ideals, female leadership and the fight to promote science and reason over superstition. Written during the Covid pandemic, the book also reveals the extraordinary impact of inoculation on the understanding of contagion, the development of public health, and in building the foundation without which vaccination would not have emerged.