Vera Gedroits was a towering, sweet-faced lesbian princess, an ardent supporter of workers’ rights who regularly performed true medical miracles of surgery. On one occasion, she even frogmarched an inquisitive Rasputin out of a ward for wounded officers.
While working for César Roux at the world’s best known medical institute in Lausanne, Vera became the world’s first woman surgeon. Off the back of this, she was appointed by the doomed Tsarina to teach the women of the Romanov family how to be nurses.
In 1919, Vera was sent to Kyiv, where her hospital reforms, innovative work and academic papers crowned an extraordinary career. During the troubled 1920s, in times of extreme danger, she completed a remarkable series of memoirs. The princess-surgeon’s prose, including a startling candid account of her early years as a revolutionary factory doctor, has been compared to that of Pasternak.
Some years later, Vera and her widowed lover Countess Maria Nirod were seized in the middle of the night and taken away at gunpoint during the Soviet purge of scientific intellectuals. Their whereabouts for the next few months were never disclosed. Vera’s pension was cancelled. The hospital and institute were closed. Living in extreme poverty, Vera died two years later of uterine cancer. She was just 61.
The princess’s name was removed from official Soviet medical records; her tremendous contribution to medicine and the radical improvements to wartime surgery she pioneered as the first female battlefield surgeon have remained unacknowledged to this day. Now, Miranda Seymour uncovers the riveting story of a daring and brilliant woman who chose to make Ukraine her homeland, someone adored by her friends and patients and whose achievements as an administrator and bold reformer invite comparisons to Florence Nightingale.
Special Offer: Mix and match 4 in-person tickets across our entire talks programme and get the 5th on free. (This is not a loyalty programme - all tickets must be purchased in one transaction.)
In-person tickets are available above. To book Zoom tickets, click here: Online Tickets
PLEASE NOTE: Due to the nature of our historic buildings the acoustics can sometimes be challenging. Whilst we are constantly working to improve this, we recommend joining us online if you want to be sure of crisp, clear audio.
Meet the Speaker
Miranda Seymour is a novelist, biographer and critic. She has been a visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she lives both in London and at her family’s ancestral home in Nottinghamshire. Miranda Seymour began writing as a historical novelist, moving from fiction into biography during the 1980s.
