Samuel Collins

Samuel Collins (1619 – 26 October 1670; Presumably, he a pursued medical career in Padua where he graduated M.D; in 1659 his diploma was recognized by Oxford University. In 1659 or 1660 Collins was approached by John Hedben, one of several men in Russian employ assigned the task of recruiting skilled Europeans for service at the court of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Collins accepted the proposal and shortly moved to Moscow. He remained in the capital for nine years as personal physician to Tsar Aleksei. Collins practiced such remedies as Deer horns, Moose hoofs and Hare hair , apparently with success. Collins resigned from Russian service 28 June 1666 with honours and a generous pay and immediately left for England. There he compiled his notes on life in Muscovy into The Present State of Russia, in a Letter to a Friend in London. Collins declared that he deliberately had not used any written sources, pretending that no man of his intelligence and capabilities has ever traveled to Moscow. Modern analysis corroborated this claim.

Critical assessment

The book contains 26 chapters, arranged without a particular plan. As a doctor, Collins paid particular attention to local climate, nature and food habits. His account of Russian life outside of Moscow is, however, grossly incorrect: for example, he described contemporary Ukrainians as "Circassians sic, a people of Tartarian race". On the other hand, he rebutted the legendary Vegetable Lamb cryptid that found its place in Peter Petreius book.

Like contemporary Western authors, Collins indiscriminately filled the book with unreliable anecdotes. Some of these stories can be traced to common European tales; others, based on a game of Russian words, give away his knowledge of vernacular spoken Russian. about commercial rivalry between the Dutch and English traders in Muscovy (by the 1660s the Dutch were clearly winning) and about the tsar himself.

19th century Russian critics catalogued Collins under the russophobe variety of Western reporters, along with Giles Fletcher, the Elder and Peter Petreius. His unforgiving account of muscovite ethics, morality and religion is fully in line with these and other Western reports; modern analysis regards this aspect of his book as generally correct from the Protestant viewpoint of that period. His own morality is evident from the passages related to crimes and punishment: Collins approved execution of money forgers by pouring molten tin in their mouths, citing a Latin phrase with a meaning of "a fair law cures the crime with its own weapons" Likewise, Collins approved execution of wives who killed their husbands through burying them alive, because "a wife who could not even love her husband truly deserved death".

Disambiguation

Life of Samuel Collins I overlapped with the lives of two other physicians also named Samuel Collins: Samuel Collins (physician, born 1618) (1618–1710), M.D. (Cambridge), a personal physician to Charles II of England and author of A System of Anatomy Samuel Collins (physician, born 1617) (1617–1685), M.D. (Oxford), scholar and registrar at Oxford University

Father of Samuel Collins I, the vicar of Braintree, was also named Samuel. Ambiguous events in this biography were interpreted as in C. H. & Thomson Cooper 1860 article.