The portrait of Catherine the Great is enlarged. Her 1787 letter to Count Rumiantsev called for a national vaccine campaign.
Russia was transformed into a powerhouse of Europe by Catherine the Great's leadership. She was a leader in public health policy, and championed a nation-wide vaccine campaign against smallpox, which many viewed with distrust. The letter by the Empress is for sale at MacDougall's in London. The portrait of the monarch as the "Lawgiver in the Temple of Justice" was painted by Dmitri Levitsky, who was a favorite of the Russian court. The items are expected to sell for a lot of money.
In 1979 the World Health Organization declared the disease to be eradicated, but many people don't remember how devastating it could be. It began with a high temperature and a rash. The victim would develop blisters, which eventually became scar tissue. The survivors were scarred for life, sometimes even blinded, and three in ten of them died.
The Chinese inoculated people against the disease as early as 1500s. In order to control the spread of the disease, European physicians used variolation, in which a person's saliva from a smallpox wound was rubbed into their arm or nose. The death toll was lower when people who received the treatment went on to develop common symptoms of the disease.
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There were a few doctors in England and Germany who noticed that people with the milder cowpox seemed to be immune to the disease. The cowpox vaccine was given to the family of Benjamin Jesty in England in 1774.
The date of Catherine the Great's letter is April 20, 1787, which is ten years before the medical breakthrough. The monarch had a long-standing fear of the disease and her husband, Grand Duke Fedorovich, contracted it on the day before their wedding, leaving him permanently scarred.
The first page of a letter from Catherine the Great to Count Piotr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev.
The second page of the Russian monarch's letter calls for a vaccine campaign.
Catherine was worried about her son's health when another outbreak of the disease hit. She was told to inoculate her son, but not herself. She was enlightened when many Russian doctors opposed the practice. Catherine invited Thomas Dimsdale, an English physician who had inoculated the British Royal family and aristocracy against smallpox, to St. Petersburg. She made sure to have a mail carriage ready for Dimsdale so that she could escape if the experiment went wrong.
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The young son of a sergeant-major was the source of the contents of the vaccine. On October 29, 1768, she announced her full recovery after one week of mild discomfort. Soon after, her son was inoculated. She wrote a letter to her ambassador in Britain, saying that there were no noble houses in which there weren't many vaccine-vaccinated people. "Many regret that they had a disease that can't be fashionable."
In the outer regions of the empire, the fashionability of being vaccined against smallpox did not trickle down to the Russian population. Catherine wrote a letter to the count outlining a strategy for a vaccine campaign. Here's the text of the letter.
One of the most important duties of the Welfare Boards in the Provinces that you are given is the introduction of inoculation against smallpox, which causes great harm to the ordinary people. It is now all the more convenient since there are doctors in almost all districts, and it does not cost a lot.
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To set an example, issue an order on the first occasion in each provincial town, to count the remaining superfluous conventual residences or the small monasteries that have been abolished, and build the minimum number of lodgings for the temporary stay of those who are unable to have this inoculation. Since Dr Gund in Novgorod-Seversky is able to carry out this inoculation, he can add three hundred rubles to his regular salary. We are still very much in favor of you, by the way.
Iekaterina is the author of the letter.
