Invasion, inoculation and publication: when your book becomes unexpectedly topical

By the time Lucy Ward’s first book, about Catherine II (‘the Great’) of Russia and the fight for inoculation against smallpox, was published, her subject had become unexpectedly topical. Covid and the invasion of Ukraine had turned it from a slightly niche story to one which resonated strongly with our own times. And the echoes from the past keep coming, as she tells Historia.

The trouble with writing about the past is that it won’t keep still. You think you’ve pinned it down, like a carefully collected butterfly, then unexpectedly it’s back, flapping its wings disruptively in the present.

When I pitched my book The Empress and the English Doctor, the story of how Catherine the Great had herself inoculated against smallpox by a Quaker physician from Essex, viruses were a hard sell and a mention of the Empress of Russia was likeliest to prompt arch comments about horses. I invariably had to explain the term inoculation, and fight for my belief that this 250-year-old story of courageous female leadership, public health, and mistrust of authority had important resonance today.

Then, between, pitch and contract, the Covid-19 pandemic struck. I began the book (my first) in lockdown, my planned research trips traded for a small screen on which I combed through digitised archives and family papers, exploring the impact of past epidemics while living through a contemporary one.

By the time I submitted the manuscript, in August 2021, viruses and vaccination were part of everyday conversation, and even inoculation (now a generic term but originally meaning deliberately giving a healthy patient a tiny dose of live smallpox) was more readily understood.

By publication day, in April 2022, Russia had invaded Ukraine, its eyes firmly on recapturing territories taken by Catherine II in a series of wars launched just after her inoculation.

Now, as my book’s paperback edition comes out this month, the Empress’s statue has been toppled in Odesa, and universities worldwide are beginning a process of re-evaluating and ‘decolonising’ Russian studies to give greater weight to states and languages seen for too long through their powerful neighbour’s imperialist prism.

Of course, these echoes and connections, however shocking, are hugely enriching for a writer. In the most basic sense, they help project the story: it’s not difficult now to interest readers in how 18th-century communities were shaken economically by sweeping smallpox epidemics that closed schools and markets, or in the unnervingly familiar debates over the wisdom of deliberately undergoing a small medical risk to gain protection against a more serious one that might yet be avoided.

Catherine II’s extraordinary political abilities were thrown into relief as her modern-day successors struggled to adapt to pandemic leadership. Having assessed the data, she took – unflinchingly – the decision to undergo inoculation (an established process but far from risk-free) initially to protect herself and ensure the procedure was safe for her son and heir, Paul.

But once they had both recovered, she publicised her actions with the zeal of a social media influencer – harnessing all available means, from Church services and poetry to commemorative medals and an annual national holiday, to promote her actions and encourage her subjects to follow her example.

As Boris Johnson and his fellow national leaders rolled up their sleeves and grinned nervously for ‘vaxxie’ publicity shots, they were following in the footsteps of a woman who stood alone among her contemporary rulers in using her own body to persuade others of the merits of inoculation. Catherine understood, too, exactly how to spin her actions for external consumption: barely had she got over her unpleasant three-week recuperation before she was pinging off letters to Voltaire (a fellow inoculation cheerleader) and Frederick the Great, boasting of her quick recovery and enlightened, Westward-facing attitude.

From the first time I heard about this little-known episode, through a chance meeting in a school playground with a descendant of the Empress’s Essex-born doctor, Thomas Dimsdale, I felt it shed important light on Catherine’s character and leadership, especially given the distorting focus on her sexual appetites that began during her reign and persists today. But that doesn’t obscure in the slightest the many darker aspects of this pyrotechnical, prismatic woman.

Her correspondence with Voltaire switches merrily from her successful inoculation as signifier of her progressive thinking to jubilant fantasies of Russia’s lone assault on the ‘barbarian’ Ottomans. ‘My soldiers go to war against the Turks as though they were going to a wedding,’ she wrote, ready not only to crush the enemy but ignore the hardships of her own ill-equipped troops on their winter march south. ‘It’s not enough to wage a happy war against these barbarians… it is not enough to humiliate them, they must be destroyed,’ Voltaire replied.

When Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine a year ago, with my book already in press, I turned back to my references to that earlier war of Russian imperial expansion, suddenly lurching more sharply into focus than it had done at the time of writing. Determination to launch an assault on the Turks (who had objected to Russian interference in Poland) had led Catherine to decide to reject Thomas’s caution and press on with her inoculation; once she recovered, she wasted no time in declaring war. ‘She is resolved immediately to draw the sword, and to send a proper force to her frontiers,’ the British ambassador Lord Cathcart informed ministers.

Writing to her own ambassador in London, Catherine’s intertwining of her twin obsessions was clear. ‘Now we have only two subjects to discuss,’ the Empress began, ‘first, the war, and second, inoculation.’ In a letter to Frederick II of Prussia, she segued seamlessly from boasting of her swift recovery to an uncompromising defence of her military aggression. ‘I have been attacked, and I am defending myself.’ Fresh from her victory over the smallpox virus, I wrote, the Empress felt herself invincible.

As they brace for a widely forecast spring offensive, it is no surprise – and entirely right – that Ukrainians should be grappling with traditional perceptions of their history, especially as Putin, another Russian leader who consciously allies his nation’s might with his own physical strength, is trying to manipulate the past for his own myth-making ends.

Catherine’s wars against the Ottomans would ultimately see Russia’s empire extend to Crimea and further west along the strategically crucial Black Sea. She spun not only her story of her inoculation, but of her wars too; now her statue lies in a museum basement but new perspectives on her reign are in the streets and demanding to be heard.

There is one final butterfly that has flickered back into view since my book was published. A painting by Joshua Reynolds of Omai (real name Mai), a young Polynesian man who came to Britain on Captain’s Cook’s second Pacific voyage and was inoculated by Thomas Dimsdale, is up for sale and could leave the country.

The portrait is not only aesthetically outstanding: it also adds new richness to emerging narratives of Indigenous visitors to Britain. I am campaigning to keep it in the UK, on public view, where it will help ensure that history, quite rightly, can never be pinned down.

The Empress and the English Doctor by Lucy Ward is published in paperback on 16 February, 2023.

See more about this book.

Images:

1. Empress Catherine the Great by Fyodor Rokotov, 1763: Tretyakov Gallery via Wikimedia (public domain)
2. Catherine the Great by Vigilius Eriksen: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3. Catherine the Great and her family: Wikimedia (public domain)
4. Thomas Dimsdale: Wikimedia (public domain)
5. Omai by Joshua Reynolds, 1776: Department for Culture, Media and Sport for Flickr (public domain)