Welcome to Russian History Retold Episode 219, in an interview with Lucy Ward, the author

of The Empress and the English Doctor, how Katherine the Great defied a deadly virus.

Welcome to our show, Lucy.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

So we're going to get right into the book, which I absolutely adored, I've already posted

on Facebook that I told my listeners that I've read, finished reading it long vacation

in Costa Rica, sitting on the beach, and I just didn't want to leave, even though

I was getting bit up by lots of mosquitoes, it was just an amazing book, and it's coming

out shortly in June, here in the US, and it's already available, I understand, and we

will take.

Well, let's start with our first question, since Katherine the Great made a bold decision

to get inoculated against smallpox, what do you see as the role of political leaders

in public health crises, something that we've had to deal with in the United States,

as well as you have in the U.T.?

That's right, we have, in fact, we have the world over, and it's interesting, of course,

I thought about this a lot because I was actually researching and writing this book during

a period of lockdown, and then during the whole COVID period in Britain, I'd pitched

the book just before the virus became known, but I was writing absolutely throughout.

And so I was literally writing against the background of, for example, in the UK, our

own Prime Minister contracting COVID, becoming very ill, actually going into intensive care

in hospital, and then, of course, recovering from that.

So those parallels were really sharp to me.

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