Nikolai Michailowitsch Amossow

Ukrainian postage stamp with Amosov (2013)

Cyrillic ( Russian )
	Николай Михайлович Амосов
Transl. :	Nikolaj Michajlovič Amosov
Transcr. :	Nikolai Michailowitsch Amossow
Cyrillic ( Ukrainian )
	Микола Михайлович Амосов
Transl. :	Mykola Mychajlovyč Amosov
Transcr. :	Mykola Mychajlowytsch Amossow

Nikolai Michailowitsch Amossow (born December 6, 1913 in Olchowo , Novgorod Governorate , Russian Empire , † December 12, 2002 in Kiev ) was a Russian - Ukrainian heart surgeon , designer and author . He was one of the most famous doctors in the history of the Soviet Union and received a number of high-ranking state awards, including the Order of Lenin in 1961 and the honorary title Hero of Socialist Labor in 1973 . Due to his research, he is considered to be the pioneer in the use of the heart-lung machine in the Soviet Union. Besides surgery, he was particularly interested in cybernetics .

Life

Nikolai Amossow was born into a farming family in 1913 and attended school in Cherepovets and then a technical vocational school, which he graduated as a mechanical engineer. From 1932 he worked as a shift supervisor in a power plant in Arkhangelsk . After his marriage in 1934, he began a technical distance learning course in the same year and a year later, together with his wife, a medical course at the Medical School in Arkhangelsk, which he graduated with honors in 1939. He then specialized in surgery . In 1940 he also completed his correspondence course to become an engineer. He then went back to his hometown of Cherepovets to work as a surgeon at the local hospital. From 1941 he worked as a senior surgeon in a mobile hospital due to the Second World War . Three years later he married an employee of the field hospital after he had already separated from his first wife and she had also married another man.

After the end of the war in Europe he was sent to Manchuria to care for Japanese soldiers suffering from typhoid in a prisoner-of-war camp . After a brief period in Moscow , he became the head of the surgery department at the Bryansk Regional Hospital . In November 1952 he moved to the Veterans Hospital in Kiev , and his wife began studying medicine at the local medical school. A year later he did his doctorate with a thesis on resection of the lungs in tuberculosis . From 1955 he began to turn to heart surgery in addition to operations on the lungs . His daughter was born in 1956 and his wife graduated from medical school two years later.

A year earlier, an experience during a surgeon congress in Mexico turned into a turning point in his scientific life: it was here that he observed the use of a heart-lung machine for the first time during an operation . Since it was not possible to obtain the device from abroad, he arranged for a replica to be made at his own clinic. After trials on dogs and unsuccessful operations on humans, an operation on a patient was successfully performed with this device for the first time in 1959. In 1962 he went on a business trip to the United States , where he met several well-known cardiac surgeons and learned new surgical techniques. In the same year he was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences and received the Order of Lenin along with four other pulmonary surgeons . From 1969 he was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR . In addition, he served as a deputy in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 1962 to 1979 , although he was never a member of the Communist Party in his life .

In the following years he devoted himself mainly to improving his own model of the heart-lung machine and various cardiac surgical techniques. After the clinic was rebuilt from 1972 to 1975, it was converted into an independent institute for cardiac surgery in 1983, and Nikolai Amossow became its director. Around 4,000 heart operations took place at the institute each year, around 2,000 of which were supported by a heart-lung machine. In December 1988, at the age of 75, Nikolai Amossov retired from the post of director of the institute, but performed operations himself until 1992. After his health deteriorated from the beginning of the 1990s due to heart problems and he was implanted with a pacemaker, among other things , he underwent an examination and heart operation in the Heart and Diabetes Center North Rhine-Westphalia in Bad Oeynhausen in May 1999 . He suffered a stroke three years later and died in December of that year. He was buried in the Kiev Baikowe Cemetery.

The main outer belt asteroid (2948) Amosov is named after him.

Literary work

After the death of a young girl during heart surgery, Nikolai Amossov began to write down his thoughts and feelings. He expanded the resulting diary-like manuscript repeatedly in the course of the following time. It was first published in the form of sequels in a magazine and later as a book that was translated into ten languages ​​and had a total circulation of around seven million copies. Foreign-language editions appeared, among other things, in English under the title "Thoughts and the Heart" and in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in two volumes with the title "Hearts in my hand". Other of his books dealt with his views on future developments ("Notes from Future") and his war memories ("PPG-22-66").

Works

• The Open Heart. Simon and Schuster, New York 1966, OCLC 937684332 .
• Heart in my hand. First and second book. Publishing house culture and progress, Berlin 1966, DNB 454573634 .
• Notes from Future. Simon and Schuster, New York 1970, ISBN 0-671-20547-1 ; German-language edition: The second future. Droemer Knaur, Munich / Zurich 1971, ISBN 3-426-08991-2 . (Name spelling here: Nikolai M. Amosow )
• PPG-22-66. a surgeon's was. Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1975, ISBN 0-8092-9055-3 .

literature

• Hans Joachim Alpers , Werner Fuchs , Ronald M. Hahn : Reclam's science fiction guide. Reclam, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-15-010312-6 , p. 14 f.

Web links

Commons : Mykola Amosov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Nikolai Michailowitsch Amossow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Nikolay Amosov - Life and Works (English)
• Nikolay M. Amosov - World Outlook website with biographical information (English, Russian, Ukrainian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Website of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine ( Memento of the original dated December 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - Amosov Nikolai Mikhailovich membership page, accessed November 27, 2016 
2. ^ Lutz D. Schmadel : Dictionary of Minor Planet Names . Fifth Revised and Enlarged Edition. Ed .: Lutz D. Schmadel. 5th edition. Springer Verlag , Berlin , Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 978-3-540-29925-7 , pp.  186 (English, 992 pp., Link.springer.com [ONLINE; accessed September 25, 2019] Original title: Dictionary of Minor Planet Names . First edition: Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg 1992): “1969 TD2. Discovered 1969 Oct. 8 by LI Chernykh at Nauchnyj. "