The Royal Physician's Visit
Publisher: Overlook Hardcover
Published: December 1, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 314
ISBN-13: 9781585671960
Subjects: Struensee, Johann Friedrich,; Literary; Fiction; Fiction - Historical; greve,; Queen, consort of Christian VII, King of Denmark,; Historical - General; Fiction / Literary; Caroline Mathilde,; 1737-1772; 1751-1775
First sentence: ON ARPIL 5, 1768, Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII of Denmark, and four years later he was executed.
Description: "Set in Denmark in the 1760s, The Royal Physician's Visit magnificently recasts the dramatic era of Danish history when Johann Friedrich Struensee, a German doctor from Altona, student of Enlightenment philosophers Diderot and Voltaire, and court physician to mad young King Christian, stepped through the aperture history had opened for him and became for two years the holder of absolute power in Denmark.".

"Dr. Struensee, tall, handsome, and charismatic, introduced hundreds of reforms, many of which would become hallmarks of the French Revolution twenty years later, including freedom of the press and improvement of the treatment of the peasantry. He also took young Queen Caroline Mathilde - unsatisfied by her unstable, childlike husband - as his mistress.

He was a brilliant intellectual and brash reformer, yet Struensee lacked the cunning and subtlety of a skilled politician and, most tragically, lacked the talent to choose the right enemies at court, a flaw which would lead to his torture and execution."--BOOK JACKET.