DURING this week in 1854, an extraordinary Scottish doctor died in St Petersburg, Russia.

To the Russians, he was known as Yakov Vasilyevich Viliye but in Scotland and elsewhere he was known as Sir James Wylie.

Born in Tulliallan near Kincardine-on-Forth on November 13, 1768, Wylie was the son of local church minister William and his wife Janet, née Meiklejohn. They had five children in all, of which James was the second. After his education at a local school, he was apprenticed to a physician for a short time before studying medicine at Edinburgh University from 1786 to 1789.

The medical school was arguably the world’s best such institution at that time and the teaching methods and the design of the fairly new Royal Infirmary would influence Wylie’s future career.

After university, like several Scottish doctors, at the suggestion of Dr John Rogerson, Wylie moved in 1790 to Russia where the empress Catherine the Great had been trying to modernise Russian medicine by importing foreign doctors and surgeons.

Wylie signed up for service in the Russian military and was appointed physician to the Eletsky or Yeletsky Infantry Regiment. There he found a disturbing policy – only officers were treated by the medical staff, the ordinary soldiers being left to their own devices, which nearly always meant death from either wounds or infection or malaria.

It was his treatment of officers and men for the latter disease which made Wylie’s reputation. He came up with a treatment for malaria, then known as intermittent fever, which, while not a cure, greatly relieved victims’ symptoms.

It worked so well that Wylie was given a special commendation by the regiment’s commanders. It is preserved in the Russian Defence Ministry’s Medical Corps Museum and is dated January 12, 1793: “This is to certify that the physician to the Yeletsky Infantry Regiment, Yakov Viliye, treated soldiers with fever in the regimental hospital with great success using the pharmaceutical he himself had invented and named Solutio Mineralis.”

We know it contained small amounts of arsenic, but at such a dosage that the soldiers were not poisoned. Instead, they were restored to the regiment as good as new.

In the period 1792 to 1794, Wylie improved his battlefield surgical skills and had plenty of reason to do so as Russia’s Imperial Army fought a particularly bloody war in the conflict known as the Kosciuszko Uprising, which culminated in the Second Battle of Warsaw of 1794.

It was during that war that Wylie performed what seemed a miracle to the Russians as he safely removed a bullet from a soldier’s spine. Such was his reputation that when he left the army in 175 and set up practice near the imperial court in St Petersburg, Wylie’s patient list was soon full of the high and mighty. It was here that he renewed his acquaintance with Dr Rogerson, who had been appointed English Physician to Her Majesty – an insult, surely, as Rogerson was from Dumfries.

Wylie’s big career break came when he performed an emergency tracheotomy and saved the life of Count Ivan Pavlovich Kutaysov, cousin and adviser of Czar Paul I who had succeeded Catherine the Great in 1796. Impressed by this feat, Paul I made Wylie court surgeon and his personal physician, but the good doctor was unable to save the Czar’s life in 1801 when he was assassinated by a group of officers that had been dismissed from the military.

The new emperor, Alexander I, was clearly the forgiving type as the assassins were not executed, largely because Wylie agreed to sign a death certificate saying that Paul I had died of apoplexy.

A grateful Alexander eventually put Wylie in charge of all medical services in the army and Wylie served throughout the Napoleonic War, often at the side of Alexander himself. For instance, during the defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz, a Russian general noted: “People were so much at a loss during the battle that those who accompanied Czar Alexander lost sight of him and ran in all directions only rejoining him late in the night. During most of the battle therefore only the physician Wylie, the coachman Jene, the hostler and two Cossacks accompanied the Czar.”

During his service, Wylie set about reorganising all the military medical services and found time to write textbooks including what became the standard work on field surgery. From 1808, Wylie was the president of the Medico-Chirurgical Academy of Russia, a post he would hold for 30 years.

He insisted that Russian physicians be taught in Russian rather than Latin or German as before and provided more instructions on everything from recruiting able men to keeping proper records of deaths and what caused them.

From 1812, he was back on military service and in that year’s Battle of Borodino, for example, he performed 80 field operations.

In 1814, Wylie accompanied the Czar to London where he was knighted by the Prince Regent. Alexander I asked that Wylie be made a baronet as a personal favour to him and this duly occurred.

After Waterloo ended the menace of Napoleon, Wylie was able to develop his academy and reform the military medical service to his own satisfaction. He also retained the position of physician to Alexander I and was at his side when the Czar died in 1825. A curious rumour circulated that Wylie had again faked a death certificate in order to allow Alexander to gain his wish of becoming an anonymous monk, but it was a false tale.

The new Czar, Nicholas I, went to war against Turkey in 1828, and at the age of 60, Wylie was again a battlefield surgeon and was also in command of the medical corps. It is estimated that he took part in 50 battles in all.

Wylie remained a revered figure at the Imperial Court and Nicholas I and other nobles showered him with money and gifts. When he eventually retired, Wylie was a wealthy man and he did consider buying an estate in Scotland.

He died in St Petersburg on March 2, 1854, was buried with full imperial honours. Never having married, he left his riches to the Czar, but the British Government intervened because no Briton was allowed to leave cash to a foreign power and eventually some £50,000 was distributed to his relatives.