Rebuilding From the Ruins of the War
Alexander returned to St Petersburg to find the Persian ambassador waiting to see him. He brought with him presents from the shah sent with the intention of persuading him to restore the two provinces ceded by Persia to Russia in 1813. The gifts consisted of three elephants in black accoutrements and red leather boots to protect their feet from the snow. Sadly, however, the huge animals slipped about on the ice.
Alexander did not agree to the shah’s request, to the great consternation of the Persian ambassador, who claimed he would lose his head as the result. He did, however, send his own envoy, General Yermolov, with presents of enormous mirrors, rich furs and crystal ornaments, which so pleased the shah that he agreed to forgo his demands.
The tsar left St Petersburg for Moscow in August. Then it was Warsaw in October, where he found great changes taking place. New houses were appearing and the streets of the city were paved. He then raced north to Vilna before returning to St Petersburg within a matter of days.
This was a time of innovation, as a new steam boat, one of the first in Europe, plied its way back and forth to Cronstadt (Kronstadt), Russia’s great naval base. In the following year Alexander reviewed the fleet there before proceeding to Moscow where, with the rest of his family, he spent the winter. Here again, while staying in the Kremlin, in the very part used by Napoleon from where he had watched the city burn, he was constantly occupied at most hours of the day and night.
An Englishman visiting Moscow a short time later was amazed by the cleanliness and order in the hospitals and public buildings which were ‘enforced by the constant, unexpected visits Alexander pays to them, for he is liable to appear and go through a minute inspection at any hour of the day, and sometimes in the middle of the night’.
Alexander had returned to Russia to find that the Medical Academy in Moscow, established by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, had been burned to the ground by the French. Ordering Wylie to replace it, he gave him a free hand.
Wylie had long since decided that the policy of importing doctors – many of whom were Scottish – into Russia, as established by Catherine the Great, was now greatly out of date. He believed it to be better by far to train native doctors, familiar with Russian customs and with indigenous disease.
Told that a house of three storeys with Doric pillars was available, he successfully approached the government for a grant of money to allow the building to be bought. Once converted, and with large extensions added, it became the centre for the new training college for doctors. The pediment, showing the cipher of Alexander I, bore the inscription in Russian: ‘The Medical-Chirurgical Academy’.
A similar institution was commissioned in St Petersburg. As in Moscow, it was modelled on the Medical Society of Edinburgh University where Wylie had studied as a young man. Each Academy contained an anatomical museum and a botanical garden where much rhubarb, then thought a panacea for most illnesses, was grown. In addition there was a Medical Section, a Veterinary Section and a Pharmaceutical Section. Three languages – Latin, Greek and German – were compulsory, being essential to medical students, the first two for medical classification, and the third as the language in which many treatises were transcribed. The annual cost of the maintenance of the St Petersburg Academy alone was 169,000,300 roubles60 while the building in Moscow took 147,000,340 roubles. In addition a sum of 69,000,650 roubles, common to them both, included pensions to professors, prizes to the students, uniforms for the pupils on taking up professions, and finally travelling expenses and the upkeep of libraries and museums.
Wylie remained head of both colleges for thirty years. In April 1836, a contributor to the British and Foreign Medical Journal paid tribute to his achievement with these words:
It is to Sir James Wylie that Russia is indebted for the organization of her medical schools both civil and military and it has been by his persevering industry that the medical academy of Petersburg and Moscow has arrived at the honourable rank which it now holds amongst medical institutions.61
Wylie, with the tsar’s encouragement, had already begun transforming the military hospitals, which, at the time of his arrival in Russia, were in the most deplorable state. Old dilapidated buildings, dark and badly ventilated, infested with rats and other vermin such as lice, were, to the patients who entered them, practically a death sentence. Yet despite this he met with great obstruction in his attempts to modernize and reform these long-established institutions. The old Russian doctors, hidebound in their methods, were utterly opposed to change. To convince them, he hit on the simple but clever idea of placing plants in various windows. Those facing south sprouted happily while the others withered and died.
The new hospitals were built on the lines of the institutions which Wylie, with the tsar, enthusiastic as himself for improvement, had inspected in London and Paris. A doctor who visited the Military Hospital in Moscow in 1819, described it as situated in a high and airy suburb, with an elegant frontage and two extensive wings.
It contained twelve-hundred patients but is capable of receiving fifteen-hundred. Opposite the foreign burying ground are a number of one-storey, wooden, yellow painted houses, which belong also to this hospital and which are provided with beds for three-hundred-and-fifty sick. At this establishment everything seems conveniently arranged. There is a receiving room where the patients are examined by a physician or surgeon and accepted; a bathroom and baths well supplied with cold and warm water in which those admitted, when their state allows it, are all well bathed and cleaned, or in which the sick receive particular baths by order of the physician, and a room for the deposition of the patient’s own clothes when they receive the dress of the hospital. Upstairs, in the centre of the front, a grand saloon with a lofty arched roof, embellished in the ends by Corinthian pillars, contains pictures of Peter the Great, Catherine I, Elizabeth and Catherine II. From this hall is the entry into the balcony opposite the summer gardens from which the view is extensive and pleasant. This hall is designed for the reception of the Emperor who never fails to visit this hospital when he comes to Moscow.
Most of the wards are immensely large and capable of containing a hundred-and-twenty beds. A single ward occupies the whole breadth of the building, in the centre, running lengthwise. Ranges of beds are disposed along the walls of these wards. The bedsteads of wood are painted green. Each patient has two sheets, the upper one of which is stitched to the counterpane. The heating of the wards in winter and the ventilation at all times are excellently managed . . . we found everything in the cleanest and best order . . . The Military Hospital is a splendid establishment. It does the highest honour to the Empire and to all those concerned in its direction. The cost per patient is little more than half of the Civil Hospitals – 10 to 12 kopeks per day.62, 63
That Tsar Alexander took a very personal interest in the hospitals, established by Wylie on his orders, is proved by Doctor Robert Lyall, who had come to St Petersburg to be the physician of the Countess Orlof Tchésmenska, one of the maids of honour to the empress. He describes how:
The Emperor may be seen in summer riding in a one-horse droshki, and in winter in a one-horse sledge, or walking on the quays of the Neva, or the boulevard of the admiralty in the most simple uniform. I shall never forget the first time I saw His Majesty. A few days after his return from Paris in 1815, I was introduced to Sir James Wylie, with whom I visited some of the military hospitals at Petersburg, and in which I spoke with a number of medical gentlemen. A few days afterwards, on the palace-quay, at no great distance from one of these hospitals, I remarked an officer in a plain uniform without epaulets, whom I took for one of the physicians I had seen, and meant to address him. But for my want of knowledge of the French language, at that time, I should have addressed him. While I hesitated to say Comment vous portez vous Monsier le Docteur, or simply, Docteur? the Emperor came upon me and stared. I detected my error and passed by. But what was my astonishment at seeing a number of persons, one after the other, standing to one side and taking off their hats as the said officer proceeded forward. On enquiry, I found I had taken the Emperor for a doctor.64
Lyall later described how the emperor sometimes visited hospitals totally unannounced:
On his arrival at a town, as soon as time permits, Alexander visits and examines the state of the public institutions and the hospitals, especially the military hospitals, with the minutest attention. Indeed so quick is His Majesty in his motions to these places that he sometimes arrives unexpectedly at an earlier hour than looked for and finds the establishment in its real state.65
Much as Russian doctors respected him it was Doctor Lefèvre, physician to the British Embassy in Moscow, who gave the most lasting testimony to Wylie’s achievements.
It is to Sir James Wylie that Russia is indebted for the organization of her medical schools both civil and military, and it has been by his persevering industry that the Medical Academy of Petersburg and Moscow has arrived at the honourable rank which it now holds among medical institutions . . . The common soldier has to thank Sir James Wylie for such care and protection as his predecessors demanded in vain and the army in general has to thank him for a real and effective, instead of nominal and inefficient, medical staff.66
It was not, in fact, until 1840, on the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, that Tsar Nicholas, the brother who succeeded Alexander, made official recognition of Wylie’s service to his country, by ordering the striking of a medal with his portrait on one side. This, although greatly gratifying, did not mean as much to him as a personal letter from Tsar Nicholas. ‘You yourself ceased not to give a grand example of zeal and self-denial for the welfare and relief of the suffering warriors.’67
Wylie, on receiving this, felt that his moment had arrived.