Rasputin was, most likely, the only court physician who could truly cure the Emperor and his family. The rest had simply deceived the other Russian Tsars and Emperors. Here are four of the most notorious of them.
1. Eliseus Bomelius
The Alchemist (1634). David Ryckaert III
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“The Fierce Magus Bomelius,” as Russian sources called this person, arrived in Moscow in 1570 from London, where he had been a physician and astrologer; however, at the court of Ivan the Terriblehe gained the dubious fame of a poisoner.
Bomelius came from the Netherlands and studied at the University of Cambridge to obtain a doctorate, but was unable to pass the final (sixth) year of his studies. However, that didn’t stop him from starting his practice and soon enough he built quite a reputation for himself – Sir William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth I’s chief adviser, even consulted with him regarding the Queen’s health. However, it could not save Bomelius from prison, when he was exposed for practicing medicine without a license. It turned out that the “doctor” had no means to pay the fine, so he was forced to spend three years in prison. In 1570, when he managed to get free, he caught the attention of Andrei Sovin, the Russian ambassador to England, who was looking for a doctor for Tsar Ivan. Bomelius then began his service to the Tsar.
“The evil slanderer Bomelius concocted deadly potions with such diabolical skill that the victim he poisoned gasped for breath at the exact minute planned by the tyrant,” wrote Nikolay Karamzin, who pretty much sums up all we know of Bomelius’s work in Moscow. As the Tsar’s physician, he received enormous sums of money, which he partially sent back to his homeland, to a town called Wesel.
But Bomelius’ reputation was not destined to last long – in 1574 he was exposed for spying on Ivan the Terrible for Denmark and Sweden and subjected to terrible torture: he was roasted alive on a spit and left to die in a dungeon. After this incident, for a long time the Tsar had trouble finding a new doctor.
2. Alessandro Cagliostro
Portrait of Joseph Balsamo, Comte de Cagliostro. Private collection.
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A despicable European charlatan, “Count” Cagliostro (his real name was Giuseppe Balsamo), arrived in Russia in 1779. By that time, he had already suffered several exposes and failures, and in Saint Petersburg his business was also going badly, at first. Fascination with science had been fashionable, fostered by Empress Catherine herself, while mysticism and secret societies were treated with caution by the Russian nobility. Therefore, Cagliostro had to take on the mask of a healer, as this was what the empress advised him to do. “Since you, Count, are versed in healing, put your efforts to this noble occupation, for to alleviate the suffering of men is indeed the calling of a wise man,” Catherine said during her only audience with Cagliostro.
Then Cagliostro began his practice – accepting payment, however, only from the rich. Things got better with this new audience; the count cured his new friend, a famous Russian freemason Ivan Yelagin, from a migraine, and Senator Stroganov – from a neurotic disorder. But, as soon as it concerned patients with more serious illnesses, everything went wrong. After attending Cagliostro’s sessions, a fellow assessor named Islenev became a heavy consumer. After the count admitted two-year-old Pavel, son of Prince Gavriil Gagarin, for treatment and then returned him to his parents in perfect health, rumors began to spread that Cagliostro had simply replaced the child with an impostor.
Count Cagliostro spent nine months in Saint Petersburg; he left empty-handed, without finding the success he hoped for. Empress Catherine the Great even wrote a comedy “The Impostor”, in which she mocked Cagliostro under the name “Kalifalkzherston”. It is also quite possible that the empress hurried to expel Cagliostro, because his wife, Lorenza, had become too close with Count Potemkin, one of the empress’s favorites.
3. Daniel At home
Daniel Dunglas Home, Scottish Spirit Medium, C.1860s
Legion Media
Cagliostro’s bad reputation lingered in Russia for some time. “Man is strangely drawn to everything supernatural and he deceives himself remarkably easily in the most honest way – this explains the strong influence of the Cagliostros throughout the ages and it also promotes the great success of spirit boards,” Anna Tyutcheva, Lady in Waiting to the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna’s Court, wrote in 1853, talking about the Grand Duchess’s husband, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich (the future Emperor Alexander II), fascination with table-turning. “In fact, the tables really do turn and spell out messages; some even claim to mentally answer questions posed to them,” Tyutcheva claimed.
In 1858, Daniel Home, a 25-year-old Scottish medium who performed telecine sessions, arrived in Russia. Tyutcheva described these sรฉances, performed in the presence of the Imperial couple: “The table rose to a height of half a yard above the floor. The Dowager Empress felt someone’s hand touch the frills of her dress, grabbed her arm and pulled off her wedding ring . Then the hand seized, shook, and pinched all present except the Empress herself, which this hand systematically avoided. It took a bell from the Emperor’s hands, carried it through the air, and sent it to the Duke of Wรผrttemberg. This caused cries of terror, fear, and astonishment. “
Home’s sรฉances were always performed in the dark; the “faces” of deceased relatives appearing before those present were nothing more than the illusionist’s bare heels, smeared with phosphorous oil. The hands that gripped the mystic enthusiasts under the table belonged to Home himself or his assistants. Eleven people attended his sรฉance in July 1858. The next day the sรฉance was repeated in Strelna, and another one was conducted in November.
In addition to seizing success at court, Home had a wife in Russia, 17-year-old Alexandria de Kroll, who died in 1862 of tuberculosis. In 1871, Home remarried a Russian woman – Julie Gloumeline, a sister-in-law of the chemist Alexander Butlerov, who strongly supported Home and helped him arrange his meetings with the Tsar. For this marriage, Home even converted to Orthodox Christianity. But when Butlerov tried to prove that Home really had psychic powers before a joint scientific commission in St. Petersburg, the sรฉance failed and the medium made a scene and retreated to Europe, never to return.
4. Nizier Anthelme Philippe
Nizier Anthelme Philippe
Legion Media
Of all the Russian imperial families, Nicholas II and his family were the greatest aficionados of the occult. Before Tsarevich Alexei (1904-1918) was born, Nicholas and Alexandra had been busy producing an heir – four daughters had been born to their family one by one. The Tsar and his wife went on pilgrimages and sought the company of mediums and clairvoyants.
In 1900, Nicholas II Nizier discovered Anthelme Philippe, who had gained a reputation as a healer and an occultist in France. The emperor met the miracle man during his visit to France and invited Philippe to St. Petersburg. Nothing could change the emperor’s mind – not even a report on Nizier Anthelme, compiled by Pyotr Rachkovsky, the head of Russian intelligence in Paris, which proved that the psychic was nothing more than an ordinary charlatan. Following this report, Rachkovsky was removed from office, while “maestro” Philippe was welcomed at court, where he began performing “sรฉances” with the empress.
“This is a man of small stature, black-haired and with a black mustache, about 50 years old and rather ugly, with an ugly southern French accent,” Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich wrote about him. The maestro’s medical training was limited to just three years of medical school at the University of Lyon, after which he began his practice as a psychic, mostly treating wealthy women.
“He claimed to have a power of suggestion that could influence the sex of the child developing in a mother’s womb. He did not prescribe any medicine that could be checked by the court physician. The secret of his art lay in hypnosis sessions. After two months of treatment, he announced that the empress was expecting children,” wrote Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich.
Nizier Anthelme Philippe
Legion Media
The empress’s fifth pregnancy began in November 1901. In the spring, everyone noticed that Alexandra Feodorovna had grown fuller and had stopped wearing corsets; however, she did not allow doctors to examine her – as maestro Philippe suggested, whom she visited almost every day. When the empress was finally examined in 1902 by court obstetrician Dmitrij Ott, it turned out that she was not pregnant at all. The entire imperial family was in shock. This event, however, had not changed the empress’s opinion of Philippe. His last recommendation to her, before leaving for France, was to seek the help of Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian Orthodox ascetic.
Seraphim of Sarov were then glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church the following year by order of the Emperor and the Imperial Family made a pilgrimage to the Sarov Hermitage. In 1904, their heir was born and the Imperial family was convinced that it happened according to the prediction of maestro Philippe. As Anna Vyrubova, a future woman of the Russian Empire, remembered: “Your majesty always had in her bedroom a cardboard frame with dried flowers, gifted by Philippe, which, according to him, had been touched by the hand of the Savior himself.”
Maestro Philippe was not, of course, the only charlatan who resided at the last Tsar’s throne. Nicholas and Alexandra’s fascination with the Blessed, the Holy Fools and the other “bearers of secret knowledge” was widely known among the masses. The most famous of them all was, of course Grigori Rasputin. Of all the mystics at the Tsar’s court, there is only documentary evidence of Rasputin’s success in healing Tsarevich Alexei and stopping his bleeding with hypnosis. The hatred of Rasputin in Russian society was too strong โ not least because of the shaky reputation of the imperial family, which was particularly fond of mystery. Rasputin was, in the eyes of the people, the root of all the misfortunes that had plagued Russia. In the end, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the Tsar’s first cousin, personally participated in the assassination of the “Elder”. But by that time the empire was beyond saving.
Source: sn.dk