New Book Alert! 🚨
‘I, Vera: The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess’ by Miranda Seymour
From the FT's feature:
The story of Vera Gedroits is, by any measure, extraordinary. Yet most readers of Miranda Seymour’s enthralling new biography I, Vera will never have heard of her.
Gedroits was born in Russia in 1870 to a Lithuanian prince and a Russo-German mother. Against the odds presented by birth, gender and geography, she would go on to train as a doctor, frequently adopting male clothes and pronouns as she made her way through environments in which there was no place for a woman.
As a young factory doctor in tsarist Russia, Gedroits’s determination to advocate for the rights of her poorest patients put her in considerable political peril. As a battlefield surgeon during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, she honed her skills both with the scalpel and as an administrator, revolutionising the provision of Red Cross medical support in the process.
After her war work brought her fame (and notoriety), she attracted the attention of the tsarina. She found herself in command of the imperial family’s own hospital, where she trained the tsarina and her daughters to work as surgical nurses. Read more
