Blumentrost Family

The daughter of Friedrich Gottlieb StruveCharlotte Magdalena (1717 – 1759)) – married first her cousin Ernst Gotthold Struve, Jnr. (1714 – 1743), the son of Ernst Gotthold Struve Snr. (1679 – 1758) and then in 1747 Johann Deodat Blumentrost.

Johannes Deodat Blumentrost was the son of the German-Russian physician Laurentius Blumentrost the Elder and his second wife Cäcilia Röver (nee Beermann). After initial training by his father, he received financial support from Tsar Peter the Great to complete his studies at European universities. In 1697 he traveled to Germany, where he first began his medical studies at the University of Königsberg. After defending the medical treatise: Exercitatio Practica, Sistens Medicum Castrensem Exercitui Moscovitarum Praefectum at Königsberg in 1700, he moved to the University of Halle and received his doctorate on 27th January 1702 with the work: De pulsuum theoria et praxi. After visiting Leiden University in the Netherlands, Blumentrost returned to Moscow via Archangel.

There, he first received, as had his brother Lawrence (October 29, 1692, Moscow – March 27, 1755, Petersburg), the position of a Russian field and court physician of Tsar Peter.  In 1718 he was given the task of organizing the entire Russian medical system. As early as 1719, Blumentrost had submitted to the Tsar a draft for the reform of the medical administration of Russia, which had the effect of introducing a central authority. Blumentrost himself took over their management and reorganized the pharmacy industry. In 1724 the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg was founded, whose founding member and first secretary was Blumentrost’s brother Lawrence.

If Blumentrost’s efforts were successful under the reign of Tsar Peter and his wife Katharina, this changed with the inauguration of Tsarina Anna and he was pushed from his offices in 1730. In 1731 he was finally released although part of his property was confiscated. Therefore, he moved to Moscow, but in a fire in 1737, he also lost all his possessions. He moved back to St. Petersburg, where he had to spend his last years in miserable circumstances. In 1747 he married Charlotta Magdalena Struve (born Struve) (born June 2, 1717 in Jena, † August 17, 1759 in Narva), the widow of Ernst Gotthold Struve. From this marriage there was a daughter Maria Elisabeth Blumentrost (born November 28, 1747 in St. Petersburg, † December 29, 1775), who on April 29, 1774 at St. Petersburg married Friedrich Johann von Gersdorff (1735, † 25. Married in March 1805).