Letter from Catherine the Great shows her support for vaccinations

When smallpox ravaged communities in the 18th century, Catherine the Great was one of the first people in Russia to adopt a precursor to vaccines.

Catherine’s support for an early form of vaccination is recorded in a letter due to be auctioned in London on Wednesday. In it, she instructs a governor-general to ensure that a smallpox prevention method called variolation is readily available in his province.

According to a translation of the auction house’s letter, Catherine, like many world leaders, sought full protection from an infectious disease that was devastating her empire. “Such vaccinations should be common everywhere,” she wrote, “and it is all the more convenient now that almost all counties have doctors or medical personnel and it does not require a large expense.”

MacDougall’s, a London auction house specializing in Russian art, is auctioning the letter along with a portrait of Catherine by Dmitry Levitsky. In the portrait, the empress wears a small crown and a hermelin-trimmed cloak.

The items together are valued at between $ 1 million and $ 1.6 million, according to the auction house.

The auction house listing does not name the current owner of the objects, but says that they come from a private collection in Russia. The painting was previously exhibited in museums in St. Petersburg and Moscow, it is said.

Auction house director Catherine MacDougall said the auction’s first announcement had led to more than 100 interview requests from news organizations in Russia, where there was keen interest in Catherine’s vaccination efforts.

The letter is dated April 20, 1787 and addressed to the Russian officer Piotr Alexandrovich Rumjanzew, known as Count Zadunaysky. Catherine wrote in the letter that one of Rumyantsev’s most important tasks “should be the introduction of a vaccination against smallpox, which, as we know, causes great harm, especially among ordinary people”.

Catherine and her son Pavel Petrovich were vaccinated almost two decades earlier, in 1768.

At the time, people were vaccinated with variolation, the practice of exposing people to the material of an infected pustule from a patient with smallpox. The process was used in India and China for hundreds of years before it was introduced in Europe. Enslaved people from Africa introduced treatment in the United States. It’s similar to vaccination, which uses a less harmful version of a virus, but is different from it.

Many people were suspicious of the practice, which sometimes resulted in deaths or outbreaks of a mild form of smallpox.

These concerns caused Catherine to show her support for it.

Lynne Hartnett, associate professor of history at Villanova University, said Catherine was terrified of smallpox, which infected her husband and killed the fiancée of one of her closest advisers.

She invited an English doctor, Thomas Dimsdale, to St. Petersburg to vaccinate her, her son, and members of her court. “She did it to show the Russian people that it is safe and can keep this disease at bay,” said Professor Hartnett.

Catherine provided Dimsdale with a carriage and shelter in case she died and he urgently needed a way out of Russia. Instead, she recovered from the vaccination and a public holiday was declared to celebrate the event.

Thereafter, Catherine wrote to her ambassador to Great Britain, Count Ivan Grigorievuch Chernyshev: “Starting with me and my recovering son, there is no noble house that does not have several vaccinated people and many regret that smallpox is inherent in them had. “and therefore cannot be fashionable.”

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