Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

Catherine sent for the empress’s chief physician, Dr. Boerhave, and begged him to extract the tooth that had been tormenting her for five months. With extreme reluctance, Boerhave consented. He sent for the French surgeon Monsieur Guyon to do the extraction. Catherine sat on the floor with Boerhave on her right and Choglokov on her left, holding her hands. Then, Guyon came from behind, reached around, and twisted the tooth with his pliers. As he wrenched and pulled, Catherine felt that her jawbone was breaking. “I have never in my life felt anything like the pain of that moment,” she said. Instantly, Boerhave shouted at Guyon, “Clumsy fool!” and having been handed the tooth, he said, “It is just as I feared. This is why I did not want this tooth to be pulled.” Guyon, in pulling the tooth, “had pulled out a piece of my lower jaw, to which the tooth had been attached. At this moment, the empress came into the room and, seeing me suffer so terribly, she wept. I was put to bed and was in great pain for four weeks, not leaving my room until the middle of January. Even then, on the lower part of my cheek, I still had in the form of blue and yellow bruises, the imprint of Guyon’s five fingers.”