Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov

Soviet postage stamp from 1960; published on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Pirogow's birthday

Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogow ( Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Пирого́в ; * ^July 13th / November 25th,  1810 ^greg. In Moscow ; † November 23rd ^July / December 5,  1881 ^greg. In Visnya, today in Vinnyzja , Ukraine ) was a Russian Surgeon and anatomist . He is considered a co-founder of field surgery and was one of the first doctors in Europe to use ether for anesthesia . In 1859 he published an anatomy atlas, the representations of which were based on frozen sections of a human body. His work made a major contribution to giving surgery a scientific basis in the form of reliable anatomical knowledge and appropriate training. Later he worked to improve educational opportunities for women, children, foreigners living in Russia and poor people. In Russia he is considered one of the most famous doctors in the country's history.

Life

childhood and education

Nikolai Pirogow was born in Moscow in 1810 as the son of a major and was the 13th child of his parents. He learned to read at an early age and spoke various foreign languages ​​as a child. When his father died in 1824, leaving the family with no income, Pirogow was to begin training as a civil servant. However, the family doctor, who was a professor of anatomy and physiology at Moscow University , succeeded a year later in obtaining admission to study medicine for Pirogov despite his young age.

He chose to specialize in surgery , although during his time at university he was only present for two operations and had not performed a single one himself. In 1828 he successfully completed his studies at the age of 17. He devoted himself to further studies at an institute where young graduates were to be trained to become professors. As part of his further education, he came to Dorpat, today's Tartu , and specialized in the areas of surgery and anatomy. In 1832 he received his doctorate here, then continued his education at the universities in Berlin and Göttingen and at the age of 26 was appointed professor for surgery and pathological anatomy at the University of Dorpat . He held this position until 1840.

He married in 1842, but his wife died at the age of 24 from complications following the birth of their second son. In his second marriage he was married to the baroness Alexandra Bistrom.

Work as a doctor and field surgeon

In 1841 Pirogow became professor of surgery at the 1,000-bed hospital of the Academy of Military Medicine in Saint Petersburg . In the following years he founded an anatomical institute here and trained students, including Friedrich Mering . In addition, he devoted himself to research in anatomy and pathology and spent a total of three years in military service as an army doctor. In 1847 he performed an anesthetic with ether , a year later he devoted himself to investigations into cholera . From 1852 to 1859 he worked out an anatomy atlas, which was published in 1859 under the title Topographical Anatomy of the Human Body, illustrated with sections of frozen cadavers and contained around 220 illustrations.

In 1852 he was one of the few doctors in the world who succeeded in treating an aneurysm of the brachiocephalic trunk . This is a pathological severe expansion of a blood vessel stem beginning at the aortic arch which, if left untreated, leads to death in almost all cases through a spontaneous tear. While the surgical treatment of such an aneurysm is now a standard surgical technique without major risks, it was one of the most demanding operations at the time.

In December 1854, at his own request, he began to work again as a military doctor during the Crimean War . Because of his work during this war, he is considered the founder of field surgery. Among other things, he introduced plaster casts to stabilize broken bones in surgery and developed a technique for amputating a foot called the Pirogoff operation . He also used anesthesia for the first time as a standard treatment for operations in the field. The graduated treatment of a large number of wounded, which is now known as triage, and is divided into five degrees of severity, also goes back to him. He also attached great importance to the training of nurses and, similar to the work of Florence Nightingale , advocated the formation of organized volunteer corps of nurses.

In the Crimean War he realized that any war can be viewed as a "traumatic epidemic"; As with major epidemics, there is also a lack of helping hands and even more of thinking minds in war.

Withdrawal and retirement

In 1856 Pigorov returned to Saint Petersburg. Dissatisfied with the conditions at the academy, he permanently withdrew from training and work in the hospital. In the same year he published a pamphlet in which he condemned restrictions for the poor and for foreigners living in Russia in medical training and also supported the admission of women to study. He also rejected early specialization and instead called for comprehensive primary education for all classes of the population as well as an expansion of the secondary education area. A short time later he became curator for school affairs for the south of Russia, in 1858 he took over the same office in Kiev due to differences with the governor general of Odessa . Three years later, he retired on his estate in the south of Ukraine , where he volunteered as a justice of the peace . In addition, he treated the farmers living in the area.

Nikolai Iwanowitsch Pirogow on a painting by Ilya Eefimowitsch Repin , 1881. The painting was made shortly before Pirogov's death

In 1862 he was appointed head of a delegation to oversee the education of Russian students abroad. After Giuseppe Garibaldi , one of the most popular figures of the movement for an independent Italian nation-state known as the Risorgimento , was seriously wounded in a battle in August 1862, Pirogow managed to treat him successfully during a stay in Italy. In 1865 he helped found the New Russian University in Odessa . Then he withdrew again to his property, which he only left twice for longer periods of time. In 1870, as a representative of the Russian Society for the Care of Wounded and Sick Warriors, he visited the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War and inspected the field hospitals of the two conflicting parties. Seven years later he worked again as a field surgeon in the Russo-Turkish War . In his memoirs "Lebensfragen." , Published in Russian in 1856 and in German in 1894 . Diary of an old doctor ”, among other things, he presented his views on the Russian educational system and, for moral reasons, clearly distanced himself from the numerous animal experiments that he had carried out as a young surgeon.

On May 24, 1881, Pirogov appeared for the last time in public, when he was honored in Moscow on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the beginning of his scientific career. In December of the same year he died of throat cancer . At the request of his widow, a family chapel with a mausoleum was built in Vinnytsia and Pirogov's body was embalmed . Forty years later, a similar method of conservation was used with Lenin, but Pirogov's method was more permanent. The well-preserved body of Pirogow in Vinnytsia is still open to the public today.

Awards and recognition

Pirogow was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1846 and received the Demidow Prize awarded by the Academy in 1840, 1844, 1851 and 1860 . From 1856 he was a member of the Leopoldina and in 1881 he was made an honorary citizen of the city of Moscow. Four years after his death, the Pirogov Society of Russian Doctors was founded, whose primary goal was to improve medical training and care in Russia.

Pirogov monument in the Estonian city of Tartu

The importance of the work of Pirogow in the field of medicine and for the Russian education system is recognized in many ways beyond today's borders of Russia up to the present day. At his former residence in Vinnytsia there has been a museum since 1947 and the family chapel nearby, which is used as a mausoleum and in which the well-preserved body of Pirogov is open to the public. The largest emergency medical center in the Bulgarian capital Sofia and the village in Ukraine where Pirogov had retired today bear his name, as do the Vinnytsia State Medical University and the asteroid discovered in August 1976 by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Tschernych (2506 ) Pirogov . Since 2009 he has given its name to the Pirogow Glacier on the Brabant Island in Antarctica .

Medical colleges in Moscow (today's Russian State Medical University ) and Odessa (today's Odessa State Medical University ) were also named after him until the university education system in Russia and Ukraine were restructured in the 1990s. In 1949 and on the 150th anniversary of his birthday in 1960, postage stamps with an image of Nikolai Pirogow were issued in the Soviet Union . The highest honor the Soviet Union received for humanitarian activities was the Pirogov Gold Medal. It is currently awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences for excellence in medicine.

Characteristic for his work and exemplary was a close connection between anatomical research and surgical practice, as he viewed detailed knowledge of anatomy as a scientific basis and thus a prerequisite for success in surgery. In medicine, therefore, in addition to the foot amputation technique he developed, some of which are still used today, some anatomical structures have also been named after him. This includes the vein angle ( Angulus venosus ), the confluence of the external jugular vein , the internal jugular vein and the subclavian vein , which is called the Pirogoff angle in English-language literature . The aponeurosis of the biceps muscle , a structure of connective tissue at its base, is called Pirogoff aponeurosis in the English-speaking world . The triangular area between the jaw tongue leg muscle , the intermediate tendon of zweibäuchigen muscle and the hypoglossal nerve (XII. Cranial nerve) is (English as Pirogoff triangle triangle Pirogoff ), respectively.

Pirogowa work was the subject of the film Пирогов ( Pirogow , 1947) by Grigory Kosinzew .

Name spelling

The Russian spelling of his name is " Николай Иванович Пирогов ". For his family name, in addition to the forms “Pirogow” and “Pirogov”, which are based on the currently common conventions for transcribing Russian names into German and English , especially in older publications and in medical parlance, the transcription “Pirogoff” is also appropriate Find. His first name is given in some older German-language works such as the fourth edition of Meyers Konversations-Lexikon as "Nikolaus".

Fonts (selection)

• Clinical surgery. Leipzig 1851-1854.
• Topographical anatomy of the human body, illustrated with sections of frozen carcasses. Saint Petersburg 1859.
• Surgical anatomy of the arterial trunks and fascia. Revised by Julius Szymanowski. With 50 illustrations drawn from nature by F. Schlater , lithographed by C. Schmiedel. CF Winter, Leipzig / Heidelberg 1860 ( reader.digitale-sammlungen.de ).
• Basics of general war surgery. Leipzig 1864.
• Report on the military sanitary facilities in Germany, Lorraine and Alsace. Leipzig 1871.
• The military medical service and private aid in the theater of war in Bulgaria 1877–78. Leipzig 1882.
• Life questions. An old doctor's diary. Fischer, Stuttgart 1894 (German edition; in the Russian original Saint Petersburg 1856).

literature

• Pirogov, Nicholas . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 13, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 85.
• Pirogov, Nikolay . In: Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon 1894–1896, Volume 13, p. 162.
• Pirogov, Nikolai . In: Theodor Westrin, Ruben Gustafsson Berg (eds.): Nordisk familjebok konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi . 2nd Edition. tape 21 : Papua – Posselt . Nordisk familjeboks förlag, Stockholm 1915, Sp. 932 (Swedish, runeberg.org ).
• Pirogov, Nikolaj Ivanovič . In: Personal database for the project "Scientific relations in the 19th century between Germany and Russia in the fields of chemistry, pharmacy and medicine" at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig.
• Olga Malakhova: Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogoff (1810-1881). In: Clinical Anatomy , 17/2004. Wiley-Liss, pp. 369-372, ISSN  0897-3806 .
• Ilya Voloshin, Philip M. Bernini: Nickolay Ivanovich Pirogoff: Innovative Scientist and Clinician. In: Spine. 23 (19) / 1998, pp. 2143-2146. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, ISSN  0362-2436 .
• Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov: Questions of Life: Diary of an Old Physician. Science History Publications, Sagamore Beach MA 1992, ISBN 0-88135-061-3 .
• Michael Sachs: History of Operative Surgery. Vol. 3. Historical Surgeon Lexicon. A biographical and bibliographical handbook of important surgeons and surgeons. Heidelberg 2002, 306-318.
• Erich Hesse: Nikolai Pirogow. In: The surgeon. - Journal for all areas of operative medicine, 2 (1930), pp. 124-129.
• Anatolij Michajlovič Geselevič, Efim Ivanovič Smirnov: Nikolaj Ivanovič Pirogov. Naučno-biografičeskij očerk. Moskva 1960.
• Vladimir Akimovič Volkov, Marina Vladimirovna Kulikova: Rossijskaja professura. XVIII - načalo XX vv. Biologičeskie i mediko-biologičeskie nauki. Biografičeskij slovar '. Sankt-Peterburg 2003, pp. 349-350.

Web links

Commons : Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Nikolai Iwanowitsch Pirogow in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Pirogov, Nikolai Ivanovich. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1164.
2. ↑ N. Pirogow: Fundamentals of general war surgery. Leipzig 1864.
3. ^ Member entry of Nicolai I. von Pirogoff at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on August 10, 2015.
4. ^ NI Pirogow gold medal. Russian Большая золотая медаль РАН имени Н.И. Пирогова . Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed May 1, 2018 (Russian). 
5. ↑ Film data for Пирогов (1947) on kino-teatr.ru (Russian), accessed on July 26, 2020

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 8, 2007 .