The Tsar's Doctor

by Mary McGrigor

  The structure was strengthened with the latest inventions of the developing industrial age: the roof supported by a metal framework and the ceilings in the great reception rooms with iron girders. Greatest of innovations was the Jasper Room, which, having been totally burned out, was replaced by the even more magnificent Malachite Drawing Room as the principal reception room of the tsarina’s suite.

  One practice that was discontinued after the ruinous fire was the keeping of cows in the attics under the roof. The animals, needed for fresh milk, nonetheless produced odorous manure and the tsar, who had a keen sense of smell (he forbade smoking in the palace and even in the streets) may have detected it.

  The Winter Palace, of which the principal façade measures 500 feet in length, is believed to contain 1,057 rooms, 1,945 windows and 1,786 doors, together with innumerable staircases and passages connecting the many suites of rooms. In Wylie’s day, while the ground floor was mostly offices, the royal family lived on the first floor above. The Jordan Staircase, so named because the emperor descended from it at Epiphany, when the waters of the Neva were blessed by priests, led from the state, or ambassador’s entrance, up to the great reception rooms, branching off from either side. Redecorated largely in the rococo style, these were the scene of the lavish receptions, which as the Chief Army Medical Inspector, Wylie was commanded to attend.

  Possibly, as he grew older, he found these public duties a physical strain. With no chairs provided, everyone was made to stand. The scale of entertainment was enormous. The dining room alone could seat 1,000 while the state rooms, on occasion, were crammed with at least 1,000 more guests. The restored building was well heated with countless fires and stoves. The rooms and corridors were filled with the scent of hothouse plants as outside the temperature fell far below freezing and the river became near solid with ice.

  As a trusted friend of the family to which he had been so long attached, Wylie was present at Romanov family weddings, when the bridal procession walked from the Malachite Drawing Room, through the state rooms, to the Palace Grand Church.

  Yet for all the palace’s magnificence, the tsar himself lived a life of austerity within its walls. Obsessed as he was with his army, Nicholas slept on a camp bed on a mattress filled only with straw.

  Wylie himself, according to his great niece, ‘usually sat in a small room containing only a writing table and two chairs and half a dozen favourite dogs lying on the floor. When at home he, soldier like, made his midday meal on black bread and salt but frequently, according to the custom of the country, he went to some acquaintance, either in the palace or the city, where he dined as a member of the family.’97

  Renowned for being careful with money, he was not opposed to gaining some financial return for promoting the tsar’s favourite hair oil, Rowland’s Macassar Oil. The famous hair tonic, discovered by Tsar Nicholas, one imagines on his visit to London in 1844, had to be sent to Russia by the makers. So dark and pungent was the oil that it gave its name to the antimacassars which began to be spread over the backs of seats in railway carriages throughout Europe and likewise used by house-proud Victorians in Britain to protect their sofas and chairs. The oil was sold in bottles, each one of which, even 100 years later, was wrapped in a leaflet containing a copy of a letter from Sir James Wylie, Physician at the Court of St Petersburg, which ran: ‘I have it under command from His Imperial Majesty that you will without delay send ten guineas’ worth!’

  It was not only hair oil that came from Britain: Wylie’s aged but still indomitable mother, Janet, announced she was coming to visit him. He did his best to stop her, but determined as ever, she somehow made the long journey, presumably by sea, to arrive triumphantly in St Petersburg.

  Wylie’s youngest brother Walter, captain of a ship called the Baronet (doubtless in Sir James’s honour) visited several times. Landing in St Petersburg, he was summoned to an audience with the tsar. Asked to dine at the palace, he was much impressed by the gold plate but even more so by the courtesy of Tsar Nicholas, who, despite the fact that French was the language usually spoken, insisted on this occasion that those who were present spoke English throughout the evening to avoid embarrassing his guest. Walter also left Russia with presents of a beautiful gold and platinum cup and saucer and two very large and valuable diamond rings. At a later date his son, then a sailor boy, was given a large silver pen and pen holder by his uncle who, if parsimonious in some ways, was certainly indulgent to his relations.

  As he grew older, Wylie became renowned for his eccentricities. Nonetheless, such was the affection of the royal family and eventual esteem of the colleagues whose jealousy had so greatly plagued his early years that he came to be regarded in St Petersburg with the reverence due to his age.

  It was in 1838, following its restoration, that Wylie left the Winter Palace to live in the house he had bought in the street known as the Galerney, near the English Quay. It was here that the American Doctor Channing was to find him some sixteen years later. Now aged over seventy, Wylie chose to retire from his positions as Chief of the Military Medical Department and President of the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Medical Academy, which he had held for thirty years since 1808. Nonetheless, although eased from some of his responsibilities, as a privy councillor, a rank that no physician in the Russian service had ever reached before, he remained significant in the government of the autocratic tsar. Already having been awarded Russian noble rank, in 1828, he held the Russian orders of St Vladimir, 1st Class, the diamonds of the St Alexander Nevsky order and St Ann order.

  Rulers of other countries who had adopted his medical practices also honoured him with decorations. He held the French Legion of Honour, the Red Eagle of Prussia, the Crown of Württemberg and the Leopold of Austria.

  In addition to his estate at Vileiskoye, near Minsk, Wylie had received an additional 7,120 roubles a year for his long service. His many presents included a diamond ring and snuff box from Tsar Nicholas as well as a magnificent coach. In Russia he was regarded as one of the most prominent men of his day.

  Most bizarrely, from Appleby’s Caledonian Phalanx, comes the claim that Wylie was even honoured by Napoleon. This may, however, refer to the pair of pistols he is known to have possessed, taken some time either during or after the retreat from Moscow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Last Days

  Wylie was living in his own house in Galerney when the American Doctor William Channing arrived in St Petersburg in the spring of 1854, just before the war with France and Britain began. He left a description of what he found within the house.

  The rooms about which I wandered were singularly deficient in furniture but on the walls were some pictures . . . At length the servant reappeared and asked me to follow him to Sir James. Upon entering the room my whole attention was attracted by the figure of a very tall old man between eighty and ninety stretched at full length upon a sofa.’

  ‘Let me know how I can serve you,’ said Sir James, without attempting to rise.

  Channing then told him that he wished to visit the civil and military hospitals, whereupon Sir James replied that a doctor with the rank of colonel would call on him in the morning and take him to all the hospitals he wished to see.

  It appears quite plain from the American’s journal that he and the old Scotsman struck up an immediate rapport. Channing continues to recount how hardly a day passed during his visit to St Petersburg when he did not visit Sir James. Although obviously frail, his mind was clear and he talked much of his experiences during the war with Napoleon when he had seen so many battlefields, nearly always in company with Tsar Alexander, the man of whom in retrospect he spoke with the reverence due almost to a god. Particularly he told of Leipzig, when Alexander himself had so narrowly escaped fatal injury from the cannon ball which, hurtling through the body of Count Moreau’s horse, had destroyed both of its rider’s legs. He described how, with no alternative, he had amputated both of the limbs: the death of the count, although inevitable, still seemed to
lie heavy on the physician’s mind.

  On a more cheerful note he told his servant to bring the patent of the baronetcy, which Channing understood had been conferred upon him on the battlefield, although actually it had been on Ascot Heath. Perhaps, by this time, bewildered by so many reminiscences, one or both of them was becoming slightly confused. He also showed the American all the decorations and orders he had received from the many monarchs he had served.

  On another day something was said which took him back to his boyhood and his servant was sent to bring him ‘a certain package which was very carefully opened and its contents showed to me. ‘‘Here,’’ said Sir James, ‘‘are my school books. My first writing books, my ciphering books, and these are my mathematical manuscripts. You see I have kept them all.’’ ’ His visitor was amazed by the condition of these notebooks, in which the writing was so neat and precise and the paper still almost as good as new, although slightly yellowed with age.

  Sadly, Wylie then described how his memoirs, compiled it would seem in his retirement, had been destroyed on the orders of the tsar. ‘The emperor had directed it,’ was all he said.

  Why, one wonders, did he obey? Channing was probably the first to be horrified to hear that such an irreplaceable record of Russian history had been lost to the world. Rational explanations remain hard to find, but it can only be surmised that it was the fear of exposure of his grandfather’s undoubted madness, or else a paranoid terror of publicity, which made Tsar Nicholas, whom Wylie had known from his childhood, condemn to the flames an autobiography of such enormous interest.

  On the day before he left St Petersburg, Channing paid his last visit to Galerney Street where, to his great distress, he found Sir James Wylie very ill.

  He had passed a wretched night and was breathing with so much agony, and was so exhausted, that he could hardly raise his hand to me or say farewell. He was stretched out on the sofa, as he was when I first saw him, and it seemed impossible that he would ever rise from it again. I thanked him for all the kindness he had showed me and took my leave. It was not without sadness, this leave-taking at the borders of the grave.

  Wylie died on 2 March 1854. Although a public figure, his private life remains mysterious, hidden by the web of secrecy that he himself did much to preserve.

  From the available evidence it would seem that his abiding passion was complete absorption in his work. It is said that he found recreation in gymnastics and bodily exercises, that his favourite sports were swimming, horse-riding, fencing, ice-skating, billiards and hunting. His intellectual interests, however, were limited due to the fact that his immense workload all but monopolized his time.

  In mid-life he was described as being stout, with a confident appearance and robust health. His height of 1.88m and his thin red hair marked him as a northerner.98 The same source continues that his character was distinguished by a number of valuable qualities: straight-forwardness and candour, enormous diligence and persistence, confidence and skill in communicating with other people. In Russian literature he is known as an excellent organizer and administrator, with a quick and supple mind.99

  Despite this, he had detractors. He is said to have been both arrogant and conceited, a sycophantic courtier ‘who hung upon the lips of the most powerful and surrounded himself with flatterers . . . patronising friendliness alternated with fits of anger where he could be wrong and unjust and reveal all his contempt for those under him’.100

  Is this the voice of truth, or rather the jibes of colleagues whose jealousy remained unquenched? Certainly it must be remembered that even Doctor Lyall, while deriding Wylie’s capabilities as a doctor, nonetheless admitted that none did more for the Russian soldier than he.

  Wylie’s undying attachment to Alexander seems, in fact, to have been based on a near paternal relationship with a man so vulnerable to depression and illness as to be almost dependent on his support. Over and above this, despite his human weaknesses, and perhaps because of the courage with which he faced the demons besetting his mind, Wylie greatly admired the emperor to whom he became indispensable both as physician and friend.

  Wylie was by then known to be eccentric, careful with his money and fiercely protective of his privacy. Suffice it to say that, at least when living in the Winter Palace, he was perfectly happy with the company of his dogs, existing, when not asked out to dine, on black bread and salt. Respected and to some extent feared in old age, he died with the secrets of his own life, and the knowledge of what really happened to Emperor Alexander whose trust, under no circumstances, would he ever betray.

  He certainly had planned at one point to return to Scotland for at least part of the year. His great-niece testifies to his having been ‘seized in a tenement of houses in Kincardine in April 1823 belonging to the sequestered estate of George Millar, shipmaster, to whom he had given two loans of £150 each’. Confirming his intentions he had asked Mr Edward, a Dundee merchant, husband of his niece, who came to visit him in Russia in June 1839, ‘to look out for a suitable property’. He had, he assured him, ‘no desire to leave Russia and return permanently to Scotland’ but wished to have a home in his native land where he could enjoy ‘a month or two of sport in an interesting district’. He thought of buying Harviestoun Estate, near Dollar, and actually began negotiations for purchasing Glenogil near Kirriemuir, the difficulty being that he did not want a large house, ‘knowing from experience that such is the cause of considerable annoyance and anxiety’, as he told his niece. Nevertheless, planning to buy land in Scotland he invested £50,000 in British bonds at 3 per cent in order to have money readily available.

  Mrs Edwards, to whom he spoke with great affection of his relatives in Scotland, was obviously a favourite among them. Her uncle gave her a valuable diamond ring, which he himself had been given by Catherine the Great, while her husband departed with a Siberian topaz and a seal that had been presented to the doctor by Emperor Alexander. Later Mrs Edwards was to receive a very fine Persian cloak, a pocket Bible which his mother had given him, his portrait and one of the medals that had been struck on the orders of Tsar Nicholas on the occasion of celebrations in St Petersburg to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Wylie’s service under the Russian government.

  Two sons of his eldest brother William (the schoolmaster in Dundee) who went out to visit their uncle in Russia prospered greatly, while William’s grandson (son of the minister of Carluke whom Wylie had tried to persuade to return with him to Russia) ‘was for many years one of the most respected citizens of St Petersburg’. It would seem that it was William, father of Wylie’s great-niece, who, ‘when a sailor boy in St Petersburg’, was given ‘a large silver pen and pen holder which combined a mathematical instrument’,101 and David Wylie, a son of Sir James’s brother Robert, died in Moscow in 1836.102

  Sir James Wylie, who died aged eighty-six, was buried in the Volchoff burial ground in St Petersburg. While his nephew George was the chief mourner, his funeral was attended by the tsar and all the members of the court, regardless of the fact that war between Russia and Wylie’s native country was just about to be declared. Having never married he left no direct descendants, but the money he had invested in British bonds, with the idea of buying an estate in Scotland, was eventually divided among his relations. A case raised in the Court of Chancery by Walter, his only surviving brother, decreed that under British law this money could not be alienated to a foreign power.

  The residue of his fortune, valued at 1.5 million roubles, however, went to the Emperor Nicholas and the Russian nation specifically for the building of ‘a large hospital at St Petersburg to be attended by the pupils of the Medico-Chirurgical Academy’.103

  Five years after his death, when the Christmas Day of 1859 fell on the seventy-ninth anniversary of the enrolment of the young doctor from Scotland to the Eletsky Regiment, a monument in the courtyard of the Wylie Clinical Hospital was dedicated to his memory. It shows him sitting on a rock, in the parade uniform of an army surgeon, with his book on ‘Military Pha
rmacy’ at his feet. In his left hand he holds a paper scroll; in his right a pencil. The statue, cast in bronze, stands on a pedestal of black Finnish marble carved with emblems of Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health. One of the four sides shows Wylie’s coat of arms, designed for him by Tsar Alexander himself. Another is a representation of the first meeting of the academy, a third depicts him saving wounded on the battlefield, and a fourth bears the dedicatory inscription.

  The Mayakovskaya Hospital, built to Wylie’s memory with the money he had left, was opened in 1873. Designed in the shape of a W in his honour, it contained 150 beds of which 120 were free and the remainder for paying patients. Today the hospital holds departments of haematology and clinical immunology, with the clinical oncology of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma increasingly significant.

  And so in Russia the doctor from Scotland, so largely forgotten in his own country, is remembered not only as a medical pioneer and personal physician to three tsars, but as the man who, by introducing field hospitals, saved thousands of soldiers from dying untended on the battlefields, as Russia fought for survival against Napoleon’s might.

  Envoi

  Less than a year had passed since the death of Sir James Wylie when, on 24 February 1855, the news of his army’s disasters in Eupatoria reached Tsar Nicholas I. According to Doctor Mandt, the tsar’s new personal physician, this ‘stunned him and struck the fatal blow. ‘‘How many lives sacrificed in vain!’’ he murmured sadly while speaking of his poor soldiers.’

  From that moment on, according to his doctor, the tsar refused to eat, and handed over almost all of his responsibilities, particularly those not concerned with the army, to his eldest son, the Grand Duke Alexander. Very shortly after this he developed a cold that turned into influenza. However, none of Doctor Mandt’s warnings that it was dangerous would stop him from going out, wearing only an overcoat, to the huge and draughty riding school to review and say farewell to a detachment of Guards Infantry about to leave for Lithuania.