According to Kinbote (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Samuel Shade (the poet's father) had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton:
With commendable alacrity, Professor Hurley produced an Appreciation of John Shade's published works within a month after the poet's death. It came out in a skimpy literary review, whose name momentarily escapes me, and was shown to me in Chicago where I interrupted for a couple of days my automobile journey from New Wye to Cedarn, in these grim autumnal mountains.
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Linner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building "a hurley-house." But enough of this. (Kinbote's note to Line 71)
The protagonist and narrator of Gulliver's Travels (1726), a novel by Jonathan Swift (an Anglo-Irish writer, 1667-1745), Lemuel Gulliver supposedly studied for three years (c. 1675–1678) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, leaving to become an apprentice to an eminent London surgeon; after four years (c. 1678–1682), he left to study at the University of Leiden, a prominent Dutch university and medical school. He also educated himself in navigation and mathematics, leaving the university around 1685. The Russian tsar Peter the First visited Leiden University in October 1698, a trip that was instrumental in the development of Russian medicine and science, heavily influenced by Dutch medical and scientific practices. During his visit, he toured the university, including the anatomical theatre, and was particularly interested in the medical and scientific institutions. He later recruited graduates like Nicolaas Bidloo to work in Russia and purchased scientific collections to found institutions like the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Kunstkamera museum. During his 1697-1698 Grand Embassy to Western Europe Peter I also studied navigation. Samuel Shade, Colonel Peter Gusev (the "real" father of King Charles the Beloved) and Martin Gradus (the father of Jakob Gradus, Shade's murderer) seem to be one and the same person whose "real" name is Pyotr Botkin. The name and patronymic of his son is Vsevolod Petrovich. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade's "real" name). Nadezhda means “hope.” There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov (a target of Pushkin’s epigrams, “half-milord, half-merchant, etc.”), will be full again.
Btw., khirurg ('surgeon' in Russian, borrowed from Greek via German Chirurg) and demiurg (Demiurge) are the only words that rhyme with Peterburg (St. Petersburg). Exton may thus hint at VN's home city. In his commentary Knbote mockingly calls Gradus (who contented that the real origin of his name should be sought in the Russian word for 'grapes,' vinograd) Vinogradus and Leningradus. Leningrad was St. Petersburg's name in 1924-1991.
Emmanuel College in Cambridge brings to mind Emanuel Swedenbog (a Swedish theologian and mystic, 1688-1772) and Immanuel Kant (a German philosopher, 1724-1804).