The pioneering surgeon who stood up to Rasputin

A forgotten medical pioneer

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0:30Why has one of history's most remarkable surgeons been almost completely forgotten? That's the question that acclaimed biographer Miranda Seymour takes on in her latest book, I, Vera, an account of the astonishing life of the world's first female professor of surgery. In today's episode of the History Extra podcast, Miranda tells Eleanor Evans about the painstaking research that uncovered a woman whose legacy was deliberately erased, and explains why her achievements deserve to be celebrated today. Miranda, thank you so much for joining me on

1:05the History Extra podcast. How are you doing today? I'm very happy to be here. Such a terrific podcast, so I feel very honoured. It's lovely to be hosting you today, and we're here to talk about your latest subject, Vera Gedroy. It's the subject of your biography, I, Vera. I wanted to ask, you mentioned in your introduction a bait that hooked you in as a story-loving biographer. What was it? I think that I said in my introduction that I'm a biographer who's very much drawn to the idea of

1:35writing about women who have been neglected, misread, misinterpreted, basically who I feel I want to have them revisited, their lives reinterpreted. And to do that requires a real passion on my part, because quite often, as with Vera, as with another book I wrote about a Bugatti racing driver, these are completely unknown women in the wider world. And so the subject has to grab me in the way that I hope

2:07to, if you like, grab the reader. And what happened with Vera was that Mel Gedroy, who's the wonderful one half of Mel and Sue and the British break-off and all of that, belongs to an extraordinary family, all as brilliant and funny and talented as she is. And their family had grown up with the knowledge of this extraordinary kinswoman, Vera Gedroy. And their parents had been passionate about her. And one of the Gedroy's, Mel's brother, just hijacked me in a doorway one day, as he had done, I must say,

2:43frequently before with little success and said, have I got a story for you? And I said, oh God, not another, rather rudely. And he looked so dejected that I said, okay, I'll give you five minutes. Well, the short answer is that 15 minutes later, he said, we've been talking for a while and you haven't stopped me. And I said, no, because I'm going to write it. And what drew me to this was the idea of Vera, partly because I'm fascinated by medicine and surgery and the really rotten deal

3:19women have been given in that world. And it shocks me a good deal that even today, only I think it's 8% of women in private surgery, which is pretty bad. It is changing, but it's taken a very long time. And at the time of Vera, she was born in 1870. She became just a tiny scrap from her life. In 1929, she became the first woman professor of surgery in the world. First ever.

3:53I think it gives us a great sense of Vera as a pioneer.

Lithuanian roots and early life

3:56Yes.

Lithuanian roots and early life

3:57And history is quite improbable. As you say, there are so many sort of different threads that we can pull on throughout this conversation. If we can start with her sort of Lithuanian heritage, situate us in her story. Where does she come from? What her sort of origin story, if you like? One thing I should alert our listeners to, and I had to be very aware of, is that Vera had completely vanished from history. She died in 1932. She'd come on the wrong side, who didn't, of Stalin. She lived in Kiev for the last 12 years of her life. And like all the intelligentsia and

4:32the medical establishment there, who were regarded as troublesome, they had just been erased. And Vera's name had vanished. Her work had been destroyed systematically. And all that I had to go on when I embarked on this project were, thank goodness, a good few of her really remarkably well-written case histories that survived. She became a very good writer, and you can see it in the case histories. And astonishingly, just three copies of her six memoirs she'd written when she was living in Kiev,

5:11remembering her earlier life. Now, these memoirs are fantastic. I called the book I Vera, because of the voice that comes through them. It's a voice of such resonant positiveness and energy. She was compared to Pasternak at the time. She was a colleague of Bulgakov. And I think she can stand alongside them. But, and here's the but I had to watch out for, Vera's ego, I suspect like many surgeons, was titanic is too small a word. And of course, in her memoirs, she was not ever going to

5:46describe a failure, or not a failure of a major kind. So, that was my problem. I had to go in search of a woman, knowing that I was relying on her own account of a magnificent, intrepid life, where you sort of were going, go Vera, knowing that it's a part wishful thinking. You have to do a bit of sifting through the fact and fiction there. Just, just a little bit. But luckily, firstly, there had been a very good biography written in

6:18Russian, which has never been translated by Vladimir Choklov, called The Color is White, rather unmemorably. And this was a medical life of Vera. Well, that was very helpful. But he hadn't really looked as much as I wanted to at Vera's personal life. And her life began, as I said, in 1870 in southwest Russia. But what's tremendously important to Vera's sense of herself is that her

6:48father, who she adored, he was a very promiscuous, very charming, very charismatic man, who plainly wished in a way that Vera had been his son. And Vera dressed like a boy and lived a gender-free life, let's say, for all of her life. She just had no truck with any problems that might face being a woman. And her father was behind her in that. Now, her father was, does one say, deposed? He'd lost his title. He came from Lithuania, where his own father had had his legs burned off outside the palace,

7:26which turned out when Vera visited to be really more like a hovel in a wood. But to her mind, it was a palace. Her grandfather's legs had been burnt off because he would not give away the whereabouts of the Polish scouts who were hiding from the Russians. Lithuania at that time was very, very hostile to Russia. But Vera grew up in Russia and was given a very wild free life of a kind that's very, very unlike anything we experienced in the West.

8:00I loved a quote you gave of her own quote, I think. I might paraphrase here, but something like, how can I be a Cossack with frills about my knees? It gives a sense of this unconventional upbringing, this freedom, as you say, to dress as she wants or maybe act as she wants from this unconventional family background. Moving forwards a little bit in her story,

Encounters with primitive medicine

8:18there's so much detail in your book, so we might skip over a little bit. Apologies. But when does she first have her imagination captured by medicine? When does she first want to help people, heal people? How does this come to her? That really happened from growing up in a very primitive part of Russia. And Vera, as a child, didn't go to Moscow or St. Petersburg. She was living, one could say, out in the sticks. If you look at pictures of Russian villages at that time, the houses are very often built of mud and

8:49straw. She wasn't living in a world of sophisticated medicine. And the local doctors and surgeons were very ill-equipped to cope with disease, which was rife. Vera, as a child, was constantly aware of two major killers. There was no cure at that time. One was typhus. And two of her cousins and her beloved brother, Sergei, whose name she took as a writer, kind of in honour of Sergei, all died of typhus.

9:26And the cures at that time were unbelievable. It was things like putting a mustard plaster on your leg. Well, the mustard plaster was simply to create a pain that would distract your mind from another worse pain. It didn't do anything for typhus. They would give patients camphor. And search me still, I'm still trying to find out why they thought camphor was any good. Bulgakov was giving his patients camphor before he wrote The Master of Margarita and became a writer. It was a traditional

9:57cure. The other major fear of the time, which we forget in our much more environmentally friendly world where we all love the wolf. Well, in Vera's time, they did not love the wolf. The czar had actually put out a special edict warning people, protecting them from wolves, because many of the wolves were rabid. And when they were rabid, I didn't know this, it was when they were rabid, they would go near people. And if you were bitten by a wolf or by a rabid dog that had been bitten by a

10:31wolf, you'd had it. So it was really living in a world that was ill-equipped to deal with mortality, that inspired Vera, so it would seem, as a child. But she was living in a world that was very hostile all over the world, not just in Russia, to the idea of women in medicine. And so Vera, supported by this splendid, charismatic father, not her mother. Her mother didn't really approve of it at all,

11:03fought her way forward with great difficulty. I'd really not been aware of how long still today it takes a surgeon to qualify. And back then, Vera qualified for her first exams in Russia in 1912. She'd actually been taught, she was very lucky, out in Lausanne by an extraordinary man called César Roux, who was the pinup of surgeons all over the world who would travel there

11:36to be taught by him. So Vera was very lucky, and obviously incredibly good at her work, because right towards the end of her life, she gave a friend a little bit of paper on which César Roux had said to her that he wanted her to take on his clinic in Lausanne. Quite an honour. It's an honour indeed, and she's forging this reputation as someone who's got such skills in this field and very knowledgeable. Another thread we can pull on at this time in Lausanne, she has some significant relationships

12:10with women. And this is an aspect of her life we can perhaps go into now as well.

Relationships and radical politics

12:14Vera's affection for women, certainly in the way she tells it in her memoirs, was there from her earliest years. One of the very entertaining episodes in her memoirs is where she fell in love with a beautiful young woman called Nadia Nadezhda, who came to stay in their house. And Nadezhda had lost her own fiancé in a flood in the town. And so she was feeling very bereaved and miserable, and apparently

12:47allowed the thrilled little Vera, aged about 12 or 14, to come and sleep in her bed with her, and even to stroke her hair and sometimes unbind her flowing plaits of blonde hair. Anyway, the ghastly moment of shock for poor Vera came when she realised that actually it was her father who Nadezhda was having an affair with, and Nadezhda was asked to leave the house. But this is where there's already a very, very clear trajectory in Vera's life, which will always be towards women and strong women. And there's a young

13:24woman who she went to rescue as a young girl who was a Narodnik, that is to say she was a nihilist, she was a revolutionary, she was anti-the czar. And it's pretty clear, although Vera doesn't actually see it, that this was a relationship of a kind between the younger woman and the older woman, who became like a teacher, but perhaps also her lover. By the time Vera got to Lausanne, she may have had other relationships with women. She doesn't tell us about them, she doesn't tell

13:56us everything. And I try not to speculate. But she had undergone a very fascinating white marriage, I don't think it was ever consummated, to an extraordinary, charismatic, charming male fellow radical called Niki Belotsarov. Now, Niki Belotsarov had been studying anatomy alongside Vera in St. Petersburg. And they had both been put under the eye of the secret police for plotting against the czar.

14:29Vera had trouble with this for years after that, she was kept under the eye of the police. Now, Niki really, the reason she wanted to marry him partly was she needed to get to Lausanne, Switzerland. And it was at that time, extremely difficult. The czar had taken fright at the idea of women in medicine as troublemakers, which indeed they were. I mean, it's fascinating to look at that aspect of medical history in Russia. And all the way through it, you will find women who went into medicine

15:03turning into revolutionaries like Vera Figner, who assisted in the plot against Alexander II, which ended in his death. So, the czars were right. Women in medicine were trouble, and Vera too. So, Vera needed a passport to Switzerland, and the passport was to travel there as a married woman. And when she was there, she fell in love with her landlady's daughter, Rikki. And in fact, Niki, the husband, seems to have been incredibly enlightened for his time, because he actually,

15:38at one point, having gone on holiday, kind of shooting bears and climbing in Siberia with Vera, suggested that all three of them should live together. But this didn't happen. Vera went back to Russia at her father's command, because her younger sister died tragically. And Vera had to go back and help the family. I haven't said that Vera's mother was an alcoholic. So, Vera was very often given the role of kind of being the leading figure in the family. Her father called her back. And

16:14again, he was a very enlightened man. He knew she wanted to be a surgeon. He found her a job in, of all places, a cement factory, working as a surgeon. I'd love to talk about that in a bit, but at the moment, we're talking about Vera and women. Now, what broke Vera's heart while she was at the cement factory was the news from Rikki in Lausanne, who was meant to follow her out there. Rikki's mother had died. She had younger siblings she felt she had to look after. In short,

16:44she felt a responsibility to her family. She couldn't follow Vera. And Vera, it's one moment in her life where she seems to have weakened. She took the browning pistol out of her medical valise. And that tells one something about Russia. No doctor travelled around on their errands without a pistol. Vera took out her pistol and shot herself in the heart. But thank goodness she had on hand her young man she was training to assist her, who managed to get to her in time and save

17:18her life. And so Vera did not die. And instead, her life took an abrupt new turn.

Working as a factory doctor

17:25It's such a significant moment when we see, and this impact, this enduring impact that the erection Rikki leaves her with. Let's turn to this period of her in the factory as a factory doctor then. And perhaps we can go into the military side of things, how the wars make an impact on this career. Vera went into the cement factory through her father's agency. She went into a world which was very different from the super hygienic, really kind of top of the world, Lausanne, where everything

17:58was cutting edge, modern. Lausanne was one of the top places to go to in Switzerland. And Switzerland and Paris were the two places where women could get a good education in medicine and surgery. So she went from that into an incredibly rough world where she was the only woman working there as a figure on the staff. Women were working at the factory, but in a way that really made

18:29Vera's blood boil with rage. She wrote a magnificent series of poems called The Factory Poems about her experiences as a factory doctor. She worked in a cement factory twice over. And she was horrified by the conditions. If we were trying to think of an analogy, probably the nearest we could get to it would be the mid-Victorian coal mines in Wales and the way that women were treated there and children were treated there. And I think that would give us a pretty

19:03good idea of what Vera was looking at and trying to deal with. Children of five were employed for 18 hours a day. Their mothers were crawling on the ground, pulling trucks of cement along. And of course, the main injuries were ones that Vera threw her time in Switzerland. I didn't say that César Roux, her great instructor out in Switzerland, his expertise was in hernias. Well, if you are carrying heavy

19:36weights in a cement factory, it's not surprising that hernias and indeed lung disease, which Roux was also very good on, were areas where Vera's expertise came in handy, to say the least of it. And I think this is why she did not suffer more than she did when she joined the radicals in the factory who were rebelling against their brutal employers. Vera actually hid papers for them in her own desk.

20:10The perpetrators, the leaders of the rebellion, were hanged. Vera, as always in this life that was touched by luck or perhaps touched by the knowledge of her being a brilliant surgeon they could not replace, was allowed to go free. But it was shortly after that first experience in the cement factory and learning that her beloved Ricky from Switzerland couldn't come out to join her as her partner, her

20:40wife, that Vera received an extraordinary invitation from somebody called Yevgeny Botkin. Now, Botkin is really somebody who deserves a biography of his own. He's one of those figures in the whole world of the Romanovs, who is an absolute hero. He chose to die alongside the Romanovs as their doctor. He didn't have to have to. He chose to. A wonderful man with an extraordinary family. And he, I don't know how

21:11he'd come to hear of Vera, probably when she was back in St. Petersburg studying anatomy. But he sent Vera indication that she could, if she wanted, join one of the Red Cross trains going out to a war that frankly, I knew absolutely nothing about. This was the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Started really by provocation from the Russians at the very, very far eastern end of their gigantic empire. I keep having

21:47to remind myself that Russia is enormous. Which is breathtakingly enormous. And Vera's life is predominantly like most Russians sit in the West. This is right at the other end where Russia meets Japan and China. So, which sort of gives one a visual sense of justice. The other end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which is still being built at this point. And Vera went out there as a newly trained surgeon and now became a battlefield

22:23surgeon. Well, it tells one something about Vera and her extraordinary abilities. She hadn't been there a week before Botkin and his colleagues decided that not only was she extraordinary as a surgeon, but, which ties in with Florence Nightingale in a way, because I kept thinking of Florence Nightingale, who of course wasn't a surgeon or a doctor. She was an incredible administrator, which is where one can always, almost compare her with Nightingale. She had this kind of skill for looking at, say,

23:00in the area of Manchuria where they were. She would be given a bare field and told, set up a hospital, there's a battle happening two fields away. This has got to be set up and got going within two weeks. And Vera could do this. She had a way with her that made people trust her. She could size up the area and see what was to be done. Now, how do I know all this? Because I'm not relying on the memoirs here. I'm relying on an extraordinary report that Vera wrote uniquely. She's the only

23:37doctor or surgeon who did this. When she came back from that all-important war, which really is the seeds of the Russian Revolution. 1905 is when all the uproars happened in St. Petersburg, largely because of what was happening on the war front, because of the soldiers who were dying for a war that nobody wanted to be involved in. Vera uniquely came back from the Russo-Japanese War, traveling with an extraordinary man called Gorku, who she'd rescued while pioneering abdominal surgery, just one of the

24:13other things that Vera did. She's the first person to do this. And the British did not discover this. The Europeans did not discover it until January 1915. The whole first months of the First World War could have been very different in terms of deaths if they had known what Vera had discovered. So Vera traveled back to the West with Gorku, went to work again in a cement factory, and took time off

24:44that summer, July 1905, to deliver a report, which is called the Briance Conference of Doctors. And it seems that surgeons and doctors came from all over to attend it. And at this conference, Vera explained what she'd done. She told them about the abdominal surgery, which thanks to her training with Ru, actually, in Switzerland. She knew how to do. People knew how to do civilian abdominal wounds,

25:16but nobody until Vera had ever thought of trying to save the life of a soldier who was wounded in the stomach. They just left him for dead, not Vera. She realized that if dressing stations with adequate equipment could be set up near enough to the battlegrounds, lives could be saved. And she knew how to do it. So she came back, delivered this report. And in Russia, she revolutionized the way

25:48this surgery was performed, but it was never translated.

25:56Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

26:18She's clearly very impressive. She's pioneering the way that these surgeries are performed. She's obviously a skilled administrator. This reputation means that she catches the eye of the highest in Russia's society. Take us into the moment when she's sort of courted by the royal family.

Courted by the royal family

26:35And what an extraordinary life this is. One can't wonder why I was electrified by the Gedroids, the kind of it. It's sort of like being on a switchback. So she's gone from the Russo-Japanese War, which I should add, the Russians lost wretchedly. It was the first time a major power had lost against a tiny power. And Russia, from that point on, you could say was doomed, electrified. Certainly, it was set on a course for change, which came in 1917. Vera went back to work in another

27:11factory, even more brutal than the first factory had been in terms of the employers. At one point, Vera actually heard her employers suggesting that the workers could eat grass. It was a time of famine and they meant it. I mean, worse than Marie Antoinette and the cake. Horrible. Vera again sided with the workers. And this time, what the factory owners decided was, they would simply give their brilliant, tiresome surgeon so much work, she would have no time to rebel. They put her in

27:47charge of setting up a new hospital, which is still today the only place in Russia where Vera is honoured with a plaque and remembered with a tiny collection of her papers and medals. And they also put her in charge of the whole area around the hospital of probably the size of a sizable English county, looking after the villagers. And Vera's memoirs at this time are full of accounts of riding through the forests at night after a full day's work, either at the hospital or the factory,

28:22where she would go off to help people in a distant village with her pistol at her side, watching out for wolves, and arrive back at the hospital to find a queue outside the hospital gates of villagers who'd heard about her. And she never stopped. The energy of this woman is absolutely mind-boggling. Botkin, who had got to know all about Vera's achievements and her capabilities, talked to his employer, the Tsarina. Botkin was the family surgeon at the time when

28:58Rasputin had moved into the circle of the Romanovs and was beginning to become too powerful. And I think partly what Botkin thought was that a woman might become very close to the Tsarina and might possibly divert her from Rasputin's claims to be the miracle worker who could not only cure the little Tsarevich, but cure anybody else too, that I think that was why he suggested it. The Tsarina liked the

29:34idea. She may well, and I think the Tsarina is often, seems to me at least, a far more interesting, thoughtful, and complex woman than the role she was given, certainly by the Russians at the time, and still by us today, even in some of the best books. I still sense a kind of dismissiveness about Alexandra that I'm not sure she entirely deserves. She was stubborn. She was willful. She was an idiot

30:05by Rasputin and far too pleased with herself in her control of her husband. But I think that her relationship with Vera shows her at her best. She recognised Vera's abilities. She took Vera's side against an extremely hostile, male-run hospital world in the Romanovs town, Zaskozele, where they lived. They really didn't live in St. Petersburg at all. They lived in this much more healthy town on a hill where all the

30:40great families had houses. And we should come to the point of why did Vera, who is a radical, why on earth would she take a job with the Romanovs, which one might well wonder? Well, I had mentioned that Vera wrote brilliant memoirs. At this point in her life, she hadn't even thought of writing a memoir. She was besotted with poetry. Loyal to Vera, though I am on many counts, she was not a great poet. Her factory poems are extraordinary for what they tell us about life in the factories. They're very

31:14vivid, but they're not great poetry. Vera, with her titanic ego, needless to say, saw herself as ready to stand with the best. And what she knew, and again, I did not know, I don't think many people know, is that the Romanovs world out at Zaskozele was in this very same town where all the great poets of Vera's time lived. So Blok, Gumelyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, they all lived there. So I think why

31:47Vera said yes to this idea. It was obviously a very good career move. I mean, once she was close to the Tsarina, she could get anything she wanted in terms of the medical world, but she would also be right at the heart of the world of the poets. To return us to the court then, there is a moment in your book, your account, of a standoff between her and Rasputin. I wonder if we can go into this episode because I think this is, again, such a vivid example of Vera's spirit and her determination

32:19to defend her own reputation and to protect those around her. Vera was in a very difficult position at the court. She'd been given by 1914, the outbreak of war, the running of a new hospital, which was kind of in the royal purlieus, if you like. And it was four officers who, of course, the Tsar's officers were all in favour of the war. And this was an area that Vera ran. She was also in charge, incidentally, of the 64 Red Cross hospitals in the town, but this

32:55was her main thing she did at the time. She was actually itching to get back to the war front. Vera's heart, I think, was always on the battlefields. But there she was running the hospital when one of Rasputin's greatest allies, a woman called Anna Virubova, was brought into the hospital, having been in a railway accident where her legs had been crushed under a cast iron radiator. She was brought to the

33:25hospital. I don't understand why this happened quite because this was a hospital for male officers. I do not understand why, except she was, Anna was very close to the Tsarina. I imagine that the Romanovs themselves thought that if they put her under Vera, she would get the best possible treatment. So this was the best place to put her. Anna, in fact, loathed Vera and was terrified of her. She'd been in hospital once before. And Vera, I think, had given her rather short shrift. Anna was

33:59a deeply annoying character. I won't get into that now. Just trust me, she was. If you read her memoirs, you'll see why. She called the Tsar and Tsarina Mama and Papa, and their children were her sisters. And I think the sisters felt pretty fed up with her too. Anyway, Anna was brought into the hospital in a terrible state. She took one look at the surgeon who was going to be looking after her, Vera, and demanded that her friend and supporter, Rasputin, should be brought to the hospital to

34:31work a miracle. Somehow she got a message out. And to Vera's fury, the next morning, there was Rasputin. This was a chilly day in January and his coat was all covered in snow and his beard was glistening. He was six foot seven, by the way, remember, Vera's six foot one. That's kind of a useful detail to remember at this moment. Rasputin appears in the ward and Rasputin, we need to remember, was a pacifist. Whether that was good or bad is neither here nor there. What does

35:03matter is that he's in the hospital of Tsarist wounded officers who are completely men of the military. It's an impossible place for him to show his face. There he is, praying over Anna's bedside. Well, Vera marches up to him. I'm sorry I need to do this in the present tense because it somehow feels like one should. Vera marches up to Rasputin and says, I give you five minutes to leave this

35:35ward. And Rasputin closes his eyes, pretends not to hear her, and carries on praying. Vera leaves. Five minutes later, she comes back and Botkin must have been present because we have this story from Botkin's daughter later that night. So, with Botkin watching, Vera comes back in and says to Rasputin, I gave you five minutes. Rasputin keeps his eyes closed, raises his voice and prays a bit louder. Vera takes Rasputin by the shoulders and frog marches him out of the ward past the, I imagine,

36:13delighted officers lying in their beds. Perhaps they were cheering, I like to think so. And shoves him through the door and holds it shut with her weight on the other side, while Botkin can hear Rasputin screaming with rage, you bloody woman, you viper, I'm going to get my own back on you. You wait till the Tsarina hears about this, etc. And Vera then comes back on her own. Now, here to me is a really interesting thing. Rasputin's power was pretty much insurmountable by 1915.

36:48Nobody could say a word against him, including Botkin. But Vera got away with it. Nothing happened. The Tsarina must have known about it. But Vera was allowed to just carry on. It's a real symbol there of how much she meant to the people around her and what she was capable of. It's a wonderful story. So vivid. Thank you for that.

The revolution and later years

37:09So what's next for Vera in terms of after the revolution? I realise, again, we're skipping over a few parts here, but let's get into the next chapter of her story. I'd like to mention one thing, which again is contradictory in this extraordinary woman's story, which is that when the news came to the annex hospital that the Tsar had abdicated, our great radical, our revolutionary, our defender of the people at the factories, stood there in

37:40front of all the nurses with tears pouring down her face. She didn't even try to wipe them away. So Vera evidently did have feelings of affection. We know that she was devoted to Tatiana, the second daughter, and that Tatiana actually looked on Vera as a second mother. I think probably Vera was rather more fun, dare I say it, than the Tsarina, and probably much more generous in allowing the girls who came to the annex hospital to work there as nurses learning their

38:13trade. And I think Vera would often turn a blind eye to the flirtations in a way that the Tsarina would not. So come the revolution, Vera, as one might expect, went straight back to the battlefields. Vera is now 47. This is too old for a surgeon to rejoin the battlefield. So she took seven years of her age, which has confused people ever since, adjusted the picture in her passport or identity

38:43thing, and went back to the battlefields as an ordinary doctor. Such was her skill that she was promoted at the speed of light and became the leading surgeon and again the administrator. But she was wounded. And that is how she came to Kiev. She was brought there as a patient, was taken on by the Kiev Medical Institute, which was at that time the most forward-looking medical establishment in Russia.

39:17Because of course, at that time, although even then Ukraine was fighting for its autonomy, but it was seen as part of Russia. Vera joined the Institute and was so successful in her work, doing extraordinary things. I mean, like she was doing facial surgery long before the First World War. She was doing paediatrics. There seems to have been absolutely nothing this woman couldn't do. And that's probably why she was in part made Professor of Surgery. But it was also for a very tragic

39:53reason. In 1929, Stalin was measuring up Ukraine as a source of grain to sell abroad. Not really for the good of Russia, which is what he said it was for the good of selling abroad and bringing more money in. And for this, the collectivization of Ukraine was necessary. He probably rightly suspected that the intelligentsia and the medical establishment would fight this. And he took the usual simple measure,

40:26which was to fake a subversive movement that was against Stalin, round everybody up. A whole lot of them were sent off to the Gulag. A whole lot more were killed. Vera and her lover, Countess Nirod, who worked with her in the medical world, were imprisoned. But as always, Vera's luck held. Somebody in Stalin's checker had previously been a czarist officer who had been operated on by

40:56Vera. When he heard she was imprisoned, he had her released. And that was the point at which he was made Professor of Surgery. Her old boss, meanwhile, had been demoted, his family were killed, and he was never allowed to practice again. So Vera has continued to, as you say, have some fortune. But also, I think her life kind of proves this old adage that people can make their own luck also. It feels like she's really forging her own journey. Very much so. As you say, living a life outside the margins of the time with her lover, Countess Nirod.

41:32We might leave readers to discover the rest of her story in the pages of your wonderful book. But I wonder if we can get a closing thought from you, Miranda, in terms of, you've touched on it already with the parallel to Florence Nightingale. But why her legacy hasn't sort of reached the same heights, why she's been more forgotten, and why you've had to uncover and unpick so much of her story? Florence Nightingale's reputation was never either compromised or at risk in the way that happened to Vera. But we have to remember they were living in utterly different worlds. Florence Nightingale was

42:07living in 19th century England, where there was a great deal of hostility to the idea of women's surgeons. I was fascinated to discover that women like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson were studying surgery secretly with male surgeons teaching them, but that it all had to be kept undercover. It wasn't until the First World War that they were allowed to come out and practice in public, and even then only in

42:37women's hospitals. Vera, who in a way had had a far more liberated life. She'd worked in the factories. She'd been a surgeon who'd been on the battlefields. There'd never been any question of Vera's skills and brilliance being challenged until Stalin. It was inevitable, I think, that Vera would fall victim to Stalin's, I mean, repressive regime seems a bit of an understatement for it.

43:10What happened was that the Kiev Medical Institute was closed, and Vera was seen as a figure who could make trouble. She lost her job in 1930. She got cancer. She was exiled to the edge of Kiev and died. She was buried in a modest graveyard on the edge of Kiev. Fascinatingly, I mean, there are so many strands we can't touch on here. Her grave was curated, one might say, by the Archbishop of Kiev. Now, don't let

43:43that thought just sort of run past you. We're living in the time of Stalin. Religion is absolutely forbidden. An Archbishop looked after Vera's grave until his own death when he was buried beside her. That's pretty extraordinary. Vera's papers vanished, and I was only able to find these extraordinary memoirs with great difficulty through people helping me in Russia, despite the difficulties we're having with Russia at the moment. It was wonderful to find how many supporters today Vera has out there.

44:21So, I did find the memoirs, and I was able to find a wonderful translator here to help me, and I hope, fingers crossed, they're going to be published by Pushkin Press next year, which would be marvellous, because, I mean, that's such fun apart from everything else, marvellously written. But Vera's name vanished because it was intended to vanish. It was never meant to emerge again. And the only way I could find it was through the Gedroids family, who knew about her.

44:55Well, what a remarkable woman to be on the trail of, and what richness in the source material as well. Thank you for giving us just a taste of Vera's story today, Miranda. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a joy. Thank you.

Publishing her remarkable story

45:06That was Miranda Seymour speaking to Eleanor Evans. Her book, I, Vera, is published by William Collins in the UK, and is out now. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going.

45:37Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai.spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai.spotify.