This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Medicine and politics are best kept separate. As I write, Lord Mann has just issued a report into widespread anti-Semitism in the NHS, with a series of recommendations that doctors and other staff should follow.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023, there have been too many incidents where Jewish staff and patients have felt intimidated by pro-Gaza activists in scrubs. This is what can happen when healing yields to hysteria and doctors become doctrinaire.
Treating all patients equally is a cardinal principle of medical ethics. My grandfather, Dr Thomas Hunt, served as an Army physician throughout the Second World War. He also treated politicians, amongst them the prime ministers Churchill and Eden, well aware that medical judgements could and did have political consequences. (He was one of the four doctors who signed the “Medical Ultimatum” that forced Eden’s resignation on health grounds in 1957.) But Tommy Hunt tried his best to keep politics and doctoring apart. His patients valued his medical opinions: the rest was silence.
(William Collins, £25)
The career of Dr Vera Gedroits, a generation older and born in Lithuania rather than Britain, was very different. As a female surgeon in the chaos of an increasingly fissiparous Imperial Russia and an ever more monolithic Soviet Union, she could not avoid politics, but she stuck to her liberal principles and survived against all odds. She came close to death many times, not only beset by war and revolution, but menaced by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, and the Cheka, their even more bloodthirsty Communist successors.
Remarkably, she not only endured incredible danger and hardships, but flourished in her pioneering medical work. Vera had pilgrimaged to Lausanne as one of the first women ever to train as a surgeon, under the celebrated César Roux. In 1929, she became the first female professor of surgery anywhere in the world, a feat not replicated elsewhere for 63 years.
By then she had been practising for a quarter-century, as a battlefield surgeon, village GP and factory in-house doctor. She was well known as the author of Surgical Conversations, a classic of medical literature, and as a specialist in several fields — including abdominal surgery and cancer.
Shortly before that apotheosis, however, Vera had been caught up in one of Stalin’s purges, based on a non-existent conspiracy, and spent months in a Kyiv prison. It was a miracle that she did not vanish into the Gulag archipelago. In 1932, during Ukraine’s genocidal famine, the Holodomor, she died of uterine cancer. That she has a memorial at all is due to an archbishop who tended her grave and was, many years later, buried beside her.
What made Vera’s survival under Lenin and Stalin even more extraordinary, however, was her past as a key figure in the court of the Romanovs at their country residence in Tsarskoe Selo, outside St Petersburg.
Despite her radical politics, her medical renown was such that she was personally recruited to the Court Hospital by the Tsarina Alexandra, who was understandably desperate for help in caring for her haemophiliac son, the heir to the empire. Vera did what she could for the sickly lad, but it was his two older sisters, Olga and Tatiana, who loomed larger in her life.
During the Great War, at the Empress’s instigation and under Vera’s supervision, a new military hospital, known as the Annexe, was created at Tsarskoe Selo for wounded soldiers. There, Vera trained Alexandra and her daughters as surgical nurses, along with female courtiers. The only trouble was that the princesses kept falling in love with their patients.
The tensions surrounding this imperial hospital gave rise to the best of the many scenes in Miranda Seymour’s marvellous biography that could have come out of a novel by Pasternak or a poem by Akhmatova.
These were the years when Rasputin was reaching the height of his influence — and doing irreparable harm to the reputation not only of Alexandra, but of the Russian monarchy itself. The wolfish monk owed his power to the Tsarina’s unshakeable belief in his miraculous faith healing, to which she attributed her son’s precarious survival.
By 1915, with the First World War costing Russia millions of lives, the Annexe was full of maimed veterans, but it still found room for the Tsarina’s friend Anna Vryubova when she was injured in a train crash. Vryubova, an unreliable memoirist who disliked Dr Gedroits despite the devoted care she received from her, was also under Rasputin’s spell.
Vera informed Nicholas II that she could not allow the monk to come to her hospital to perform one of his quack “miracle cures”, if only because the Russian officers being treated there detested Rasputin. The Tsar agreed but (as usual) any orders he gave were ignored.
The next day Rasputin arrived, covered in snow, for an unannounced visit at the Annexe. Confronted at Vryubova’s bedside by a furious Dr Gedroits, he squeezed her hand and prophesied that only he could save his dear friend. Told to leave, he ignored her and began to pray. She gave him five minutes.
When she returned for a ward round with her colleague Dr Botkin, Rasputin was still there and clearly intended to stay. Vera Gedroits was a strong woman, physically as well as in character. She frogmarched the outraged monk to the door and threw him out. Rasputin threatened: “I’m going to tell them [the Tsar and Tsarina] how I’ve been treated here, damn your eyes!” But the doctor slammed the door in his face, telling him: “You go ahead! You can tell them whatever you like!”
Amongst the women at the Romanov court, who else dared to stand up to Rasputin? But Vera was no ordinary woman. For one thing, she was a lesbian who usually dressed as a man and lived openly with her lover, Countess Maria Nirod, in Kyiv during the years after the revolution, when homosexuality was decriminalised.
Then again, she was born a Lithuanian princess. Though there was no palace and little money to go with the title — her father was a womaniser and her mother an alcoholic — she was proud of her ancient lineage. All her life, she used her title and even the Bolsheviks treated this class enemy with respect.
Above all, Vera was unusual because she was a writer.
Not just a medical writer — though her wartime case histories of abdominal surgery were so brilliantly narrated that when Miranda Seymour read a couple of them to the leading British surgeon Meirion Thomas, he commented: “But that’s marvellous! She tells it like a story.”
In fact, Vera was leading a double life, as a surgeon and a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, memoirs and even a children’s book. It was almost as difficult for her to find acceptance as a woman in literary as in medical circles, but she dealt with this by publishing under the name of her brother Sergei, from whose early death she never quite recovered.
Whilst none of her works achieved the success of other literary doctors, such as Chekhov or Bulgakov, Gedroits deserves an honourable place alongside Akhmatova, Blok and other luminaries of her time, for whom she was a kind of guardian angel. On a visit to Kyiv in 1929, the poet Osip Mandelstam begged her to treat his wife Nadia, who was near death with acute appendicitis. Mandelstam was already banned and to associate with him was to risk arrest. Gedroits did not hesitate to operate. She saved Nadia Mandelstam’s life, but could not save Osip, who later died in the Gulag.
Her best writing seems to have been in the five volumes of memoirs she wrote, although only three could be published in her lifetime and the last is, like her diaries and much else, now lost. Bulgakov claimed that “manuscripts don’t burn”, but this was the conceit of a famous writer who had reason to believe that posterity would see to the re-emergence of the writings suppressed by Stalin. Vera Gedroits had no such luck: not only Soviet censors but war and neglect have taken their toll. It has taken nearly a century for her fugitive corpus to be rediscovered.
Seymour deserves high praise for reconstructing Vera’s “many lives”, doing justice to a woman who deserved better from her countrymen. Even as this biography took shape, one of her descendants, Aleksandr Giedroyć, lost his home in Ukraine to a Russian missile, taking with it a precious archive of materials on Vera.
It was the English branch of the Giedroyć family, especially the musician Miko, who introduced Seymour to the story of Vera.
That story has one final lesson for the doctors of today. Dr Gedroits lived in a profoundly anti-Semitic society and this is a recurrent theme of this book. Yet she managed, by virtue of her strict adherence to medical ethics, to rise above such hatred.
That NHS staff should need to be reminded of their duty to treat all patients equally and with dignity is, a century later, dispiriting and shameful.
