"With their kindness they made me their slave"
Left – E.S.
Botkin with Tsar Nicholas II. On the right is Evgeniy Sergeevich during the Russo-Japanese War. Photo: foma.ru, shadrinsk.net After his new appointment, Doctor Botkin was constantly with the emperor’s family, without days off or vacations. The doctor's main patient was the emperor's heir, Tsarevich Alexei. The boy felt the doctor’s sincere attitude and once wrote to him in French: “I love you with all my little heart!”
Due to the serious illness of Tsarevich Alexei and the poor health of the empress, the life physician was rarely at home. The relationship with his wife began to rapidly deteriorate. After 19 years of marriage, Olga left her husband for her sons’ teacher. The children of their own free will remained to live with their father.
“Botkin was known for his restraint. None of the retinue managed to find out from him what the empress was sick with and what treatment the queen and heir followed. He was, of course, a servant devoted to their majesties,” noted the head of the office of the Ministry of the Imperial Household, General Alexander Mosolov.
Botkin spoke about the royal family: “With their kindness, They made me Their servant until the end of my days...”. The emperor’s family answered him in the same way: “Your brother is more than a friend to me. He takes everything to heart that happens to us,” Nicholas II once said to the brother of his physician, Pyotr Botkin.
“I gave the king my word to stay with him”
In the center from right to left E.S.
Botkin, V.I. Gedroits, S.N. Vilchikovsky. In the foreground is Empress Alexandra Feodorovna with the Grand Duchesses Tatiana and Olga. Photo: wiki-wiki.ru In 1917, after the fall of the monarchy, Botkin went into exile with the Romanovs. In Tobolsk, he taught Russian language and biology to the royal children, opened a free medical practice, where he even treated guard soldiers.
According to the testimony of the Austrian prisoner Johann Meyer, who went over to the side of the Bolsheviks, Botkin was offered to leave the royal family, but he refused to do so. “Listen, doctor, the revolutionary headquarters has decided to let you go. You can take over the management of a hospital in Moscow or open your own practice. We will give you recommendations,” they told him. Evgeniy Sergeevich refused:
“I gave the king my word of honor to remain with him. For a person in my position it is impossible not to keep such a word. I also won't be able to leave an heir. How can I reconcile this with my conscience?
“There were few believers among us...”
Evgeniy Sergeevich with his wife and children.
Photo: https://opvrk.ru/ In his youth, Botkin was not religious. However, when in 1891 the doctor married 18-year-old Olga Manuilova, the life of the young family began with a loss that turned his soul upside down. “There were few believers among us,” he recalled about the graduates of the medical academy in a letter to a friend, “but the principles professed by everyone were close to Christian. If faith is added to the actions of a doctor, then this is due to the special mercy of God towards him. I turned out to be one of these lucky ones - through a difficult ordeal, the loss of my first-born, six-month-old son Seryozha.
Later, to explain how a doctor should treat patients, Botkin often used Christian imagery:
“Who should be pampered, it would seem, if not the sick, so childishly helpless and often so childishly sweet? <…> If such a patient trustfully resorts to a doctor and, as a confessor, brings to him all the groans of his soul - not a sick person, but either overly sensitive, or persecuted beyond his strength, or simply driven and forgotten - and the doctor, so that “not to spoil” him, will stop him and, having prescribed treatment, will let him go, won’t he give the hungry a stone instead of bread? The doctor knows that by doing this he is not “pampering” the patient, but is only fulfilling his sacred duty,” he wrote in the book “What does it mean to “pamper” the sick?” in 1903.
