This lesbian Lithuanian princess went to war with Rasputin – but that's not what she's most famous for

Kavita Puri on the extraordinary story of a lesbian Lithuanian princess and surgeon

Black-and-white historical photograph of Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna standing in a Red Cross nurse uniform alongside surgeon Vera Gedroits as medical personnel assist a patient.

Published: October 30, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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I recently visited the Henry VII Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey to view the tombs of the first Tudor monarch and his wife, Elizabeth of York. That period is one we think we know well; its history is often taught in schools, though typically with a focus on kings, queens and their wars. But that chapel in Westminster reveals another, less-discussed story of that time.

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The tombs were created by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who had reputedly been forced to flee his home city after breaking Michelangelo’s nose. Torrigiano was commissioned by Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII, to produce detailed gilt-bronze effigies of the king’s parents. He was assisted by a number of Venetian artists, a craftsman known only as Thomas ‘The Dutchman’, and Flemish and French woodcarvers who worked on the choir stalls and screens featuring Tudor heraldry. The hands of ‘strangers’ – as immigrants, particularly religious refugees, were known in Tudor England – have left their mark in the most English of places. Early Tudor society was far more cosmopolitan than often portrayed.

The stories we tell and the people we remember in history are dependent on so many factors – not least who we deem worthy of remembrance, who is writing the history, and who we choose to tell our national narrative. We may never know more about people – like Thomas ‘The Dutchman’ – who fall through the cracks because of the sparseness of the written record. But some are so extraordinary, making you look anew at a period of history, that you can barely believe you’ve never heard of them before. Sometimes their stories surface by chance.

In her remarkable recent book I Vera, Miranda Seymour recounts the previously lost story of Vera Gedroits. This princess from a Lithuanian royal family was an aristocratic woman who broke the mould: she was a lesbian who supported workers’ rights and, in the early 20th century, became a pioneering battlefield surgeon. Seymour managed to obtain Gedroits’ personal papers, enabling her to piece together this extraordinary life.

Born in 1870 in the Russian empire, Gedroits went to Switzerland to undertake medical training. She later returned to work as a surgeon in a factory and in local hospitals. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, she volunteered as a Red Cross surgeon near the front in Manchuria, working from a railway train. She performed complex abdominal operations, often under fire, within hours of an injury being sustained instead of waiting for the patient to be evacuated. Her work changed practices in the Russian army at the time.

After the war, Gedroits published papers that contributed to modern trauma surgery. During the First World War, she was a physician to the Russian imperial court. Following that conflict, she moved to Kyiv and was appointed professor of surgery – likely the first woman to attain this position anywhere in the world. She was removed from that role in 1930 during Soviet purges, though, and died in poverty two years later, her name erased from many official records.

Seymour’s groundbreaking biography recounts Gedroits’ story – and, in doing so, asks us to re-evaluate the origins of trauma surgery. It also makes us think about identity. Gedroits defied gender norms. She was a cigar smoker who wore suits and took female lovers. She was also unafraid to challenge the mystic and faith healer Grigori Rasputin, who wielded such a powerful influence over the Tsarina and the imperial family. Gedroits’ is a remarkable story that makes us reconsider what we think we know about women of that era.

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This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Kavita Puri

Kavita Puri is a journalist, author and broadcaster. A new edition of her book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, marking the 75th anniversary of partition, is out now, published by Bloomsbury

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