Healer, immortal, epidemic trigger… Grigori Rasputin is surrounded by many medical myths, which the cover of the song Rasputin by Majestic this summer has put back at the center of conversations.
- Rasputin’s life was first turned into song by Boney M.
- Prophet and healer for some, charlatan and womanizer for others, Grigori Efimovitch Rasputin was assassinated on December 17, 1916.
- He participates in discrediting the imperial family and constitutes one of the elements of the fall of the Romanovs.
Whereas the cover of the song Rasputin by Majestic kept us dancing all summer, Why Doctor looks back at the many medical mysteries surrounding this man.
Skills against hemophilia?
The first medical myth built around Rasputin concerns his healing skills, which he claimed to be able to perform from a distance. For the uninitiated, Grigori Rasputin was a Siberian monk born in 1869, who befriended the Emperor of Russia Nicolas and his wife Alexandra, notably by caring for their hemophiliac son for years. While many will attribute this success to supernatural powers, some historians believe that Rasputin insisted that the young boy stop taking aspirin, a drug that thins the blood.
An immortal poison-resistant man?
The other medical mystery that surrounds Rasputin is undoubtedly that of his death. Over time, his growing influence on Nicolas II became increasingly frowned upon by the nobles and other members of the imperial family, who sought to make him disappear, not without difficulty. According to legend, Rasputin survived an attempted poisoning with cyanide put in wine and cookies, and also withstood several bullets fired at him at point-blank range, eventually drowning in a river. After years of contradictory rumours, the official autopsy will finally reveal that the death would have rather been caused by the impact of three bullets in the head, the back and the chest.
Rasputin and cholera
Finally, even today, false theories maintain that Rasputin also deliberately spread a cholera epidemic in Saint Petersburg, to undermine the war effort.
.