Already feisty at high school, she slapped the principal and was expelled, then worked as apprentice assistant to a country doctor.

IN THE SPRING of 1915, a singular confrontation occurred in Tsarkoe Selo near St Petersburg. Princess Vera Gedroits, chief surgeon and director of the Imperial military hospitals, was not a woman to be trifled with. Rasputin, the tsarina’s pet holy man, whom no one dared defy, was being a nuisance on her hospital ward. She frog marched him out and left him cursing in the stairwell. Rasputin was a quack and Gedroits was the real deal. If anyone deserves to be famous but isn’t, it’s this bear-hunting, billiard-playing, mannish woman, born in 1870, the daughter of a dispossessed Lithuanian prince, who became the world’s first ever female professor of surgery.

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