I, Vera

Princess Vera Giedroytz was a towering, sweet-faced lesbian Princess who habitually wore a man’s suit, played billiards with brilliance, and regularly performed true medical miracles of surgery, while on occasion forcibly ejecting an inquisitive Rasputin from her operating theatre by throwing him down the stairs. In 1909, already lauded as a genius, Vera had been appointed by the doomed Tsarina to teach the women of the Romanov family how to assist Vera with her operations.Previously, while working for Cesar Roux at the world’s best known medical institute in Lausanne, Vera had become the world’s first woman surgeon.Later, back in Russia in 1905, she had supervised and revolutionised frontline surgery in the Russo Japanese War (1905).She won the Red Cross’s highest honors - and saved the life of an enemy soldier, the Prince of Japan, while working in nightmarish conditions: a hospital train under fire; a clay-sealed tent in temperatures that regularly reached 22C below zero. In 1919, V