Doctor from God. biography of the surgeon Pirogov in pictures

Nikolai Vasilyevich Sklifosovsky (1836-1904) - Honored Professor, Director of the Imperial Clinical Institute of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna in St. Petersburg

After examining Pirogov, N.V. Sklifosovsky said to S. Shklyarevsky: “There can be no doubt that the ulcers are malignant, that there is a neoplasm of an epithelial nature. It is necessary to operate as soon as possible, otherwise a week or two - and it will be too late ... ”This message struck Shklyarevsky like a thunder, he did not dare to tell the truth even to Pirogov’s wife, Alexandra Antonovna. Of course, one can hardly assume that N.I. Pirogov, a brilliant surgeon, a highly qualified diagnostician, through whose hands dozens of oncological patients passed, could not make a diagnosis himself.
On May 25, 1881, a council was held in Moscow, consisting of the professor of surgery at the University of Dorpat E.K. Valya, professor of surgery Kharkiv University V.F. Grube and two St. Petersburg professors E.E. Eichwald and E.I. Bogdanovsky, who came to the conclusion that Nikolai Ivanovich had cancer, the situation was serious, and he needed to be operated on as soon as possible. Presiding over the council N.V. Sklifosovsky said: "Now I will remove everything clean in 20 minutes, and in two weeks it will hardly be possible." Everyone agreed with him.
But who will find the courage to tell Nikolai Ivanovich about this? asked Eichwald, given that Pirogov was in close friendship with his father and transferred his attitude to his son. He categorically protested: "I? .. No way!". I had to do it myself.
This is how he describes the scene Nikolai Sklifosovsky: “... I was afraid that my voice would tremble and tears would betray everything that was in my soul ...
- Nikolay Ivanovich! I began, looking intently into his face. - We decided to offer you to cut out the ulcer.
Calmly, with complete self-control, he listened to me. Not a single muscle in his face twitched. It seemed to me that before me rose the image of the sage of antiquity. Yes, only Socrates could listen with the same equanimity to the harsh verdict of approaching death!
There was a deep silence. Oh, this terrible moment!.. I still feel it with pain.
- I ask you, Nikolai Vasilyevich, and you, Val, - Nikolai Ivanovich told us, - to perform an operation on me, but not here. We have just finished the celebration, and suddenly then a feast! Can you come to my village?
Of course, we agreed. The operation, however, was not destined to come true ... "
Like all women, Alexandra Antonovna still hoped that salvation was possible: what if the diagnosis was wrong? Together with his son N.N. Pirogov, she convinced her husband to go to the famous Theodor Billroth to Vienna for a consultation and accompanies him on a trip together with his personal doctor S. Shklyarevsky.

Theodor Billroth (1829-1894) - the largest German surgeon

On June 14, 1881, a new consultation took place. After a thorough examination, T. Billroth recognized the diagnosis as correct, but, given the clinical manifestations of the disease and the age of the patient, he reassured that the granulations are small and sluggish, and neither the bottom nor the edges of the ulcers have the appearance of a malignant formation.
Parting with an eminent patient, T. Billroth said: “Truth and clarity in thinking and feeling, both in words and in deeds, are steps on the ladder that lead humanity to the bosom of the gods. Following you, both a bold and confident leader, is not always the case. safe way has always been my deepest aspiration." Consequently, T. Billroth, who examined the patient, was convinced of a difficult diagnosis, but realized that the operation was impossible due to the difficult moral and physical condition of the patient, so he "rejected the diagnosis" made by Russian doctors. Of course, many people had a question, how could the experienced Theodor Billroth overlook the tumor and not perform the operation? Realizing that he must discover the cause of his own holy lie, Billroth sent a letter to D. Vyvodtsev, in which he explained: “My thirty years of surgical experience taught me that sarcomatous and cancerous tumors starting behind the upper jaw can never be radically removed ... I did not receive would have a favorable result. I wanted, having dissuaded, to cheer up the patient who had fallen in spirit a little and persuade him to patience ... ".
Christian Albert Theodor Billroth was in love with Pirogov, called him a teacher, a brave and confident leader. At parting, the German scientist presented N.I. Pirogov his portrait, on the reverse side of which memorable words were written: “Dear Maestro Nikolai Pirogov! Truthfulness and clarity in thoughts and feelings, in words and deeds - these are the steps of the ladder that leads people to the abode of the gods. To be like you, a brave and confident mentor on this not always safe path, to follow you steadily is my most zealous aspiration. Your sincere admirer and friend Theodor Billroth. Date 14 June 1881 Vienna. N.I. Pirogov expressed compliments, also recorded on Billroth's gift. “He,” wrote N.I., “is our great scientist and outstanding mind. His work is recognized and appreciated. May it be allowed for me to turn out to be just as worthy and highly useful as his like-minded and reformer. The wife of Nikolai Ivanovich, Alexandra Anatolyevna, added to these words: “What is written on this portrait of Mr. Billroth belongs to my husband. The portrait hung in his study." Biographers of Pirogov do not always pay attention to the fact that Billroth also had his portrait.
Cheered up, Pirogov went to his place in Cherry, staying all summer in a cheerful state of mind. Despite the progression of the disease, the conviction that it was not cancer helped him to live, even to consult patients, to participate in the anniversary celebrations dedicated to the 70th anniversary of his birth. He worked on a diary, worked in the garden, walked, received patients, but did not risk operating. Methodically rinsed his mouth with a solution of alum and changed the protector. It didn't last long. In July 1881, while relaxing at the dacha of I. Bertenson on the estuary in Odessa, Pirogov again met with S. Shklyarevsky.
It was already difficult to recognize Nikolai Ivanovich. “Gloomy and focused on himself, he willingly let me look at his mouth and, keeping calm, with a gesture, said several times significant: “It doesn’t heal! .. It doesn’t heal! .. Yes, of course, I fully understand the nature of the ulcer, but, agree yourself, it’s not worth it: a quick relapse, spread to neighboring glands, and besides, all this at my age cannot promise not only success, but can hardly promise relief ... ”He knew what awaited him. And being convinced of the imminent sad outcome, he refused the recommendation of S. Shklyarevsky to try electrolysis treatment.
He looked quite old. The cataract stole from him the bright joy of the world. Through the muddy veil, it seemed gray and dull. In order to see better, he threw back his head, screwed up his eyes piercingly, thrusting forward his overgrown gray chin - swiftness and will still lived in his face.
The more severe his sufferings, the more insistently he went on with The Old Doctor's Diary, filling the pages with an impatient, sweeping handwriting that grew larger and more illegible. For a whole year I was thinking on paper about human existence and consciousness, about materialism, about religion and science. But when he looked into the eyes of death, he almost abandoned philosophizing and began to hastily describe his life.
Creativity distracted him. Without wasting a single day, he was in a hurry. On September 15, he suddenly caught a cold and went to bed. The catarrhal condition and enlarged lymphatic glands of the neck aggravated the condition. But he continued to write lying down. “From the 1st sheet to the 79th, that is, university life in Moscow and Dorpat, was written by me from September 12 to October 1 (1881) in the days of suffering.” Judging by the diary, from October 1 to October 9, Nikolai Ivanovich did not leave a single line on paper. On October 10, he picked up a pencil and began like this: “Will I still make it until my birthday ... (until November 13th). I must hurry with my diary ... ”As a doctor, he clearly imagined the hopelessness of the situation and foresaw a quick denouement.
Prostration. He spoke little, ate reluctantly. He was no longer the same, a non-puppet person who did not know boredom, constantly smoking a pipe, smelling through and through of alcohol and disinfection. Sharp, noisy Russian doctor.
He relieved pain in the facial and cervical nerves with palliative means. As S. Shklyarevsky wrote, “an ointment with chloroform and subcutaneous injections of morphine with atropine are Nikolai Ivanovich’s favorite remedy for the sick and seriously wounded in the first time after injury and when driving on dirt roads. Finally, last days Nikolai Ivanovich almost exclusively drank kvass, mulled wine and champagne, sometimes in significant quantities.
Reading the last pages of the diary, one involuntarily marvels at the enormous will of Pirogov. When the pains became unbearable, he began the next chapter with the words: “Oh, hurry, hurry! .. Bad, bad ... So, perhaps, I won’t have time to describe even half of St. Petersburg life ...” - and continued on. Phrases are already completely illegible, words are abbreviated strangely. “For the first time, I wished for immortality - the afterlife. Love did it. I wanted love to be eternal; it was so sweet. To die at a time when you love, and to die forever, irrevocably, it seemed to me then, for the first time in my life, something unusually terrible ... Over time, I learned from experience that not only love is the reason for the desire to live forever ... ". The manuscript of the diary breaks off in the middle of a sentence. On October 22, the pencil fell out of the surgeon's hand. Many mysteries from the life of N.I. Pirogov keeps this manuscript.
Completely exhausted, Nikolai Ivanovich asked to be carried out onto the veranda, looked at his favorite linden alley to the veranda, and for some reason began to read Pushkin aloud: “A gift in vain, a random gift. Life, why are you given to me? ". He suddenly drew himself up, smiled stubbornly, and then clearly and firmly said: “No! Life, you are given to me with a purpose! ". These were last words the great son of Russia, the genius - Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov.
A note was found on the desk among the papers. Skipping letters, Pirogov wrote (spelling preserved): “Neither Sklefasovsky, Val and Grube; neither Billroth recognized my ulcus oris men. mus. cancrosum serpeginosum (lat. - creeping membranous mucous cancerous mouth ulcer), otherwise the first three would not advise surgery, and the second would not recognize the disease as benign. Note marked October 27, 1881.
Less than a month before his death, Nikolai Ivanovich made his own diagnosis. A person who has medical knowledge treats his illness in a completely different way than a patient who is far from medicine. Doctors often underestimate the appearance of the initial signs of the disease, do not pay attention to them, are treated reluctantly and irregularly, hoping that "it will pass by itself." The ingenious doctor Pirogov was absolutely sure: all attempts are futile and unsuccessful. Distinguished by great self-control, he worked courageously to the end.
The last days and minutes of N.I. Pirogov was described in detail in a letter to Alexandra Antonovna by Olga Antonova, a sister of mercy from Tulchin, who was constantly at the bedside of a dying man: “1881, December 9, m. Tulchin. Dear Alexandra Antonovna! ... The last days of the professor - on the 22nd and 23rd I am writing to you. On the 22nd Sunday, at half past two in the morning, the professor woke up, they transferred him to another bed, he spoke with difficulty, phlegm stopped in his throat, and he could not cough up. I drank sherry with water. Then he fell asleep until 8 am. Woke up with increased rales from stopping the sputum; the lymph nodes were very swollen, they were lubricated with a mixture of iodoform and collodion, camphor oil was poured onto cotton wool, although with difficulty, he rinsed his mouth and drank tea. At 12 pm he drank champagne with water, after which he was transferred to another bed and all clean linen was changed; pulse was 135, respiration 28. At 4 days the patient became very delirious, they gave camphor with champagne, one gram as prescribed by Dr. Shavinsky, and then every three quarters of an hour they gave camphor with champagne. At 12 o'clock at night, the pulse was 120. On the 23rd, Monday, at one in the morning, Nikolai Ivanovich completely weakened, the delirium became more incomprehensible. They continued to give camphor and champagne, after three quarters of an hour, and so on until 6 in the morning. The delirium intensified and became more indistinct with each passing hour. When I served the last time at 6 o'clock in the morning wine with camphor, the professor waved his hand and did not accept it. After that, he did not take anything, he was unconscious, strong convulsive twitching of his arms and legs appeared. The agony began at 4 o'clock in the morning and this state lasted until 7 o'clock in the evening. Then he became calmer and slept in an even deep sleep until 8 in the evening, then the contractions of the heart began and therefore breathing was interrupted several times, which lasted for a minute. These sobs were repeated 6 times, the 6th was the professor's last breath. Everything that I wrote down in my notebook I pass on to you. Then I testify my deep respect and deep respect for you and your family, ready to serve you. Sister of Mercy Olga Antonova.
On November 23, 1881, at 8:25 pm, the father of Russian surgery passed away. His son, Vladimir Nikolaevich, recalled that immediately before the agony of Nikolai Ivanovich, “the moon eclipse, ending immediately after the denouement.
He was dying, and nature mourned him: an eclipse of the sun suddenly came - the whole village of Cherry was plunged into darkness.
Shortly before his death, Pirogov received a book by his student, a well-known surgeon from the St. Petersburg Medical and Surgical Academy, embalmer and anatomist, a native of Vinnitsa D. Vyvodtsev, “Embalming and methods of preserving anatomical preparations ...”, in which the author described the method of embalming he found. Pirogov praised the book.
Long before his death, Nikolai Ivanovich wished to be buried in his estate, and just before the end he reminded him of this again. Immediately after the death of the scientist, the family filed a corresponding request to St. Petersburg. Soon an answer was received, in which it was reported that the desire of N.I. Pirogov can be satisfied only if the heirs give a signature on the transfer of the body of Nikolai Ivanovich from the estate to another place in the event of the transfer of the estate to new owners. Family members N.I. Pirogov did not agree with this.
A month before the death of Nikolai Ivanovich, his wife Alexandra Antonovna, most likely at his request, turned to D.I. Vyvodtsev with a request to embalm the body of the deceased. He agreed, but at the same time drew attention to the fact that the permission of the authorities was required for the long-term preservation of the body. Then, through the local priest, a petition is written "To His Eminence Bishop of Podolsky and Brailovsky ...". He, in turn, applies for the highest permission to the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg. The case in the history of Christianity is unique - the church, taking into account the merits of N. Pirogov as an exemplary Christian and a world-famous scientist, allowed not to betray the body to the earth, but to leave it incorrupt, “so that the disciples and continuers of the noble and charitable deeds of the servant of God N.I. Pirogov could see his bright appearance.
What made Pirogov refuse to be buried and leave his body on the ground? This riddle N.I. Pitrogov will remain unsolved for a long time.
DI. Vyvodtsev embalmed the body of N.I. Pirogov and excised tissue affected by a malignant process for histological examination. Part of the drug was sent to Vienna, the other was handed over to the laboratories of Toms in Kyiv and Ivanovsky in St. Petersburg, where they confirmed that it was squamous epithelial cancer.
In an effort to implement the idea of ​​preserving her husband's body, Alexandra Antonovna ordered a special coffin during his lifetime in Vienna. The question arose, where to keep the body permanently? The widow found a way out. At this time, a new cemetery was being laid near the house. For 200 silver rubles, she buys a piece of land for a family crypt from a rural community, encloses it with a brick fence, and the builders begin the construction of the crypt. The construction of the crypt and the delivery of a special coffin from Vienna took almost two months.
Only on January 24, 1882 at 12 noon did the official funeral take place. The weather was cloudy, the frost was accompanied by a piercing wind, but, despite this, the medical and pedagogical community of Vinnytsia gathered at the rural cemetery to see off the great doctor and teacher on his last journey. An open black coffin is placed on a pedestal. Pirogov in the dark uniform of the Privy Councilor of the Ministry of Public Education of the Russian Empire. This rank was equivalent to the rank of general. Four years later, according to the plan of the academician of architecture V. Sychugov, the construction of the funeral-red brick ritual church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker with a beautiful iconostasis was completed above the tomb.
And today the body of the great surgeon, constantly reembalmed, can be seen in the crypt. Vishnu operates Museum of N.I. Pirogov. During the Second World War, during the retreat Soviet troops, the sarcophagus with the body of Pirogov was hidden in the ground, while being damaged, which led to damage to the body, which was subsequently restored and re-embalmed. Officially, the tomb of Pirogov is called the "church-necropolis", consecrated in honor of St. Nicholas of Myra. The body is below ground level in the mourning hall - the basement of the Orthodox church, in a glazed sarcophagus, which can be accessed by those wishing to pay tribute to the memory of the great scientist.
It is now obvious that N.I. Pirogov gave a powerful impetus to the development of scientific medical thought. “With the clear eyes of a man of genius, at the very first time, at the first touch of his specialty - surgery, he discovered the natural scientific foundations of this science - normal and pathological anatomy and physiological experience - and in a short time he established himself on this basis so much that he became a creator in his field. ”, - wrote the great Russian physiologist I.P. Pavlov.
Take, for example, "Illustrated Topographical Anatomy of Cuts Made in Three Dimensions Through a Frozen Human Body." To create the atlas, Nikolai Ivanovich used the original method - sculptural (ice) anatomy. He designed a special saw and sawed frozen corpses in three mutually perpendicular planes. Thus, he studied the shape and position of normal and pathologically altered organs. It turned out that their location was not at all what it seemed at autopsy due to a violation of the tightness of the closed cavities. With the exception of the pharynx, nose, tympanic cavity, respiratory and digestive canals, no empty space was found in any part of the body in the normal state. The walls of the cavities adhered tightly to the organs enclosed in them. Today, this remarkable work by N.I. Pirogov is experiencing a rebirth: the drawings of his cuts are surprisingly similar to the images obtained with CT and MRI.
Pirogov's name bears many of the morphological formations he described. Majority - valuable landmarks during interventions. A man of exceptional conscientiousness, Pirogov was always critical of conclusions, avoided a priori judgments, supported every thought with anatomical research, and if that was not enough, he experimented.
In his research, Nikolai Ivanovich was consistent - at first he analyzed clinical observations, then conducted experiments, and only then suggested an operation. His work “On the Achilles tendon transection as an operative-orthopedic treatment” is very indicative. Before him, no one dared to do this. “When I was in Berlin,” Pirogov wrote, “I had not yet heard a word about operative orthopedics ... I carried out a somewhat risky undertaking when, in 1836, I first decided to cut the Achilles tendon in my private practice.” Initially, the method was tested on 80 animals. The first operation was performed on a 14-year-old girl who suffered from clubfoot. He saved 40 babies aged 1–6 years from this shortcoming, eliminated contractures of the ankle, knee and hip joints. He used an extension apparatus of his own design, gradually stretching (dorsal flexion) of the foot with the help of steel springs.
Nikolai Ivanovich operated on a cleft lip, cleft palate, tubercular "boneworm", "saccular" tumors of the extremities, "white tumors" (tuberculosis) of the joints, removed the thyroid gland, corrected convergent strabismus, etc. The scientist took into account the anatomical features of childhood, under his scalpel were newborns and teenagers. He can also be considered the founder of pediatric surgery and orthopedics in Russia. In 1854, the work “Osteoplastic elongation of the bones of the lower leg during exfoliation of the foot” was published, which marked the beginning of osteoplastic surgery. Anticipating the great possibilities of organ and tissue transplantation, Pirogov with his students K.K. Strauch and Yu.K. Shimanovsky was one of the first to perform a skin and cornea transplant.
The introduction of ether and chloroform anesthesia into practice allowed Nikolai Ivanovich to significantly expand the range of surgical interventions even before the beginning of the era of antiseptics. He did not limit himself to the use of well-known surgical techniques, he offered his own. These are operations for rupture of the perineum during childbirth, for prolapse of the rectum, nose plastic surgery, osteoplastic elongation of the bones of the lower leg, the cone-shaped method of amputation of the limbs, isolation of the IV and V metacarpal bones, access to the iliac and hyoid arteries, the method of ligation of the innominate artery and much more .
To evaluate the contribution of N.I. Pirogov to military field surgery, you need to know her condition before him. Helping the wounded was chaotic. Mortality reached 80% and above. The officer of the Napoleonic army F. de Forer wrote: “After the end of the battle, the field of the Battle of Borodino presented a terrible impression with almost no sanitary service ... All the villages and living quarters were crammed with the wounded of both sides in the most helpless position. Villages perished from incessant chronic fires ... Those of the wounded who managed to escape from the fire crawled by the thousands high road looking for means to continue their miserable existence. An almost similar picture was in Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Amputations for gunshot fractures of the extremities were considered as an imperative requirement and were performed on the first day after the injury. The rule was: "By missing time for the primary amputation, we lose more wounded than we save arms and legs."
His observations of the military surgeon N.I. Pirogov outlined in the "Report on a trip to the Caucasus" (1849), reporting on the use of ether for pain relief and the effectiveness of an immobilizing starch bandage. He proposed to expand the inlet and outlet of the bullet wound, excision of its edges, which was experimentally proven later. The rich experience in the defense of Sevastopol is described by Pirogov in the "Principles of General Military Field Surgery" (1865).
Nikolai Ivanovich emphasized the fundamental difference between general and military field surgery. “A beginner,” he wrote, “can still heal the wounded, not knowing well either head, or chest, or abdominal wounds; but in practice his activity will be more than hopeless if he does not comprehend the significance of traumatic concussions, tension, pressure, general stiffness, local asphyxia and violation of organic integrity.
According to Pirogov, the war is a traumatic epidemic, and the activity of administrative doctors is important here. “I am convinced from experience that what is needed to achieve good results in a military field hospital is not so much scientific surgery and medical art, but a efficient and well-established administration.” It is not in vain that he is considered the creator of the medical evacuation system that was perfect for that time. Sorting of the wounded in European armies began to be carried out only after a few decades.
Acquaintance in the fortification of Salta with the methods of treatment by gakims (local doctors) of the highlanders convinced Nikolai Ivanovich that some gunshot wounds heal without medical intervention. He studied the properties of bullets used in the wars of 1847-1878. and concluded that “the wound should be left as quiet as possible and the damaged parts should not be exposed. I consider it a duty of conscience to warn young doctors against examining bullet wounds with their fingers, from extracting fragments, and in general from any new traumatic violence.
To avoid the danger of severe infectious complications after traumatic operations, Pirogov recommended dissecting the fascia to relieve the “tension” of the tissues, believing that it was harmful to tightly suture the wound after amputation, as advised by European surgeons. Long before, he spoke of the importance of wide drainage in suppurations in order to release "miasmatic wanderers." Nikolai Ivanovich developed the doctrine of immobilizing dressings - starch, "stuck on alabaster" (gypsum). In the latter, he saw an effective means of facilitating the transportation of the wounded, the bandage saved many soldiers and officers from the mutilation operation.
Already at that time, Pirogov was talking about "capillaroscopicity", and not about the hygroscopicity of the dressing material, believing that the better it cleans and protects the wound, the more perfect it is. He recommended English lint, cotton wool, cotton, peeled tow, rubber plates, but required a mandatory microscopic examination - a check for purity.
Not a single detail escapes Pirogov the clinician. His thoughts about the "infection" of wounds essentially anticipated the method of D. Lister, who came up with an antiseptic bandage. But Lister sought to close the wound hermetically, and Pirogov proposed "through drainage, carried out to the bottom and through the base of the wound and connected to constant irrigation." In his definition of miasms, Nikolai Ivanovich came very close to the concept of pathogenic microbes. He recognized the organic origin of the miasma, the ability to multiply and accumulate in overcrowded medical institutions. "Purulent infection spreads ... through the surrounding wounded, objects, linen, mattresses, dressings, walls, floors, and even sanitary personnel." He proposed a number of practical measures: patients with erysipelas, gangrene, and pyemia should be transferred to special buildings. This was the beginning of the departments of purulent surgery.
Having studied the results of primary amputations in Sevastopol, Nikolai Ivanovich concluded: “Amputations of the hip do not give the best hope for success. Therefore, all attempts at saving the treatment of gunshot wounds, hip fractures and injuries of the knee joint should be considered a true progress in field surgery. The reaction of the body to injury is of no less interest to the surgeon than treatment. He writes: “In general, trauma affects the whole organism much more deeply than is usually imagined. Both the body and the spirit of the wounded become much more susceptible to suffering ... All military doctors know how powerfully state of mind on the course of wounds, how different the mortality rate is between the wounded among the defeated and the winners ... ”Pirogov gives a classic description of shock, which is still quoted in textbooks.
The great merit of the scientist is the development of three principles for the treatment of the wounded:
1) protection from traumatic effects;
2) immobilization;
3) anesthesia during surgical interventions in field conditions. Today it is impossible to imagine what and how can be done without anesthesia.
In the scientific heritage of N. I. Pirogov, works on surgery stand out very clearly. Historians of medicine say so: "before Pirogov" and "after Pirogov." This talented person solved many problems in traumatology, orthopedics, angiology, transplantology, neurosurgery, dentistry, otorhinolaryngology, urology, ophthalmology, gynecology, pediatric surgery, and prosthetics. All his life he convinced that it is not necessary to lock oneself within the framework of a narrow specialty, but to endlessly comprehend it in an inextricable connection with anatomy, physiology and general pathology.
He managed to selflessly work 16 hours a day. It took almost 10 years to make preparations for the 4-volume atlas of topographic anatomy alone. At night he worked in the anatomical theater, in the morning he lectured to students, during the day he operated in the clinic. Members were his patients. royal family, and poor people. Healing the most seriously ill patients with a knife, he achieved success where others gave up. He popularized his ideas and methods, found like-minded people and followers. True, Pirogov was reproached for not leaving a scientific school. The well-known surgeon Professor V.A. interceded for him. Oppel: "His school is all Russian surgery" (1923). It was considered honorary to be the pupils of the greatest surgeon, especially when this did not lead to disastrous consequences. At the same time, the sense of self-preservation, quite natural for homo sapiens, obligated many to give up this honorary privilege in case of personal danger. Then came the time of apostasy, eternal, as human world. So did many Soviet surgeons, when in 1950 the publishing house of the USSR Academy of Sciences published an abridged version of N.I. Pirogov, devoid of the former core, which consisted in the spiritual heritage of the "first surgeon of Russia." None of the apostates spoke in defense of the mentor, caring more about themselves and retreating from the legacy of the founder of the Russian surgical school.
There was only one Soviet surgeon who saw it as his duty to protect Pirogovo's spiritual heritage. A worthy student and follower of N.I. Pirogov showed himself Archbishop Luka (Voyno-Yasenetsky) in the Crimean period of hierarchical and professorial activity. At the turn of the 50s of the last century in Simferopol, he wrote a scientific and theological work entitled "Science and Religion", where he paid considerable attention to the spiritual heritage of N.I. Pirogov. For many years, this work remained little known, like many of the achievements of Professor V.F. Voyno-Yasenetsky in his medical and scientific activities. Only in recent decades, "Science and Religion" by Archbishop Luke becomes public property.

Valentin Feliksovich Voyno-Yasenetsky, Archbishop Luke (1877 - 1961) - a great Russian surgeon and clergyman

What new can you learn about N.I. Pirogov, reading “Science and Religion” nowadays, a work of half a century ago, when many Soviet surgeons, for many reasons, including out of a sense of self-preservation, refused to recognize the spiritual heritage of the “first surgeon of Russia”?
“The works of the brilliant humanist doctor Professor N.I. Pirogov, - Archbishop Luke wrote here, - both in the field of medicine and in the field of pedagogy are still considered classic. Until now, in the form of a weighty argument, references are made to his writings. But Pirogov's attitude to religion is carefully hidden. contemporary writers and scientists." Further, the author cites "silenced quotations from Pirogov's writings." These include the following.
“I needed an abstract, unattainable high ideal of faith. And taking up the Gospel, which I myself had never read before, and I was already 38 years old, I
I found this ideal for myself.
“I consider faith to be the psychic ability of man, which, more than any other, distinguishes him from animals.”
“Believing that the basic ideal of Christ’s teaching, due to its inaccessibility, will remain eternal and will forever influence souls seeking peace through an inner connection with the Divine, we cannot doubt for a minute that this judgment is destined to be an inextinguishable beacon on a winding the path of our progress."
“The unattainable height and purity of the ideal of the Christian faith makes it truly blessed. This is revealed by an extraordinary calmness, peace and hope, penetrating the whole being of the believer, and short prayers, and conversations with oneself, with God, ”as well as some others.
It was possible to establish that all the “hushed up quotes” belong to the same fundamental work by N.I. Pirogov, namely “Questions of life. Diary of an old doctor, written by him in 1879-1881.
It is known that the most complete and accurate (in relation to the original Pirogov manuscript) was the Kiev edition of “Questions of Life. Diary of an old doctor”, which was released on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of N.I. Pirogov (1910), and therefore, in pre-Soviet times.
The first Soviet edition of the same Pirogov work entitled “From the Old Doctor’s Diary” was published in the collection of works by N.I. Pirogov “Sevastopol Letters and Memoirs” (1950) The contents of the first Soviet edition testifies that, compared with the publications of the pre-Soviet era (1885, 1887, 1900, 1910, 1916), it became the only one from which, for censorship reasons, several large sections. These included not only the philosophical section, which was part of the first part of Pirogov's memoirs, which he called "Questions of Life", but the theological and political sections given in the "Diary of an Old Doctor", representing the second part of this work. In particular, those “hushed up quotations” that were mentioned by Archbishop Luke in his scientific and theological work entitled “Science and Religion” belonged to the theological section. All these censorship exceptions were partially restored only in the second Soviet edition of Vopros Zhizn. Diary of an old doctor "N.I. Pirogov (1962), which saw the light after the earthly days of Archbishop Luke ended.
Thus, Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov is not only the priceless past of our medicine, but its present and future. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the activities of N.I. Pirogov does not fit only within the framework of surgery, his thoughts and beliefs go far beyond its limits. If in the 19th century there was Nobel Prize, then N.I. Pirogov would certainly become its repeated laureate. On the horizon of the world history of medicine, N.I. Pirogov is a rare personification of the ideal image of a doctor - an equally great thinker, practitioner and citizen. So he remained in history, so he lives in our understanding of him today, being a great example for all new and new generations of doctors.

Monument to N.I. Pirogov. I. Krestovsky (1947)

S. Cherry (now within the boundaries of Vinnitsa), Podolsk province, Russian Empire) - Russian surgeon and anatomist, naturalist and teacher, founder of the atlas of topographic anatomy, founder of military field surgery, founder of anesthesia. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Biography

In search of an effective teaching method, Pirogov decided to apply anatomical studies on frozen corpses. Pirogov himself called this "ice anatomy". Thus was born a new medical discipline, topographic anatomy. After several years of such study of anatomy, Pirogov published the first anatomical atlas entitled "Topographic anatomy, illustrated by cuts made through the frozen human body in three directions", which became an indispensable guide for surgeons. From that moment on, surgeons were able to operate with minimal trauma to the patient. This atlas and the technique proposed by Pirogov became the basis for the entire subsequent development of operative surgery.

Crimean War

Later years

N. I. Pirogov

Despite the heroic defense, Sevastopol was taken by the besiegers, and Crimean War was lost to Russia. Returning to St. Petersburg, Pirogov, at a reception at Alexander II, told the emperor about problems in the troops, as well as about the general backwardness of the Russian army and its weapons. The emperor did not want to listen to Pirogov. From that moment on, Nikolai Ivanovich fell out of favor, he was sent to Odessa to the post of trustee of the Odessa and Kyiv educational districts. Pirogov tried to reform the existing system of school education, his actions led to a conflict with the authorities, and the scientist had to leave his post. Not only was he not appointed minister of public education, but they even refused to make him a comrade (deputy) minister, instead he was "exiled" to supervise Russian candidates for professorships studying abroad. He chose Heidelberg as his residence, where he arrived in May 1862. The candidates were very grateful to him, for example, Nobel laureate I. I. Mechnikov warmly recalled this. There he not only fulfilled his duties, often traveling to other cities where the candidates studied, but also provided them and their family members and friends with any, including medical assistance, and one of the candidates, the head of the Russian community of Heidelberg, held a fundraiser for the treatment of Garibaldi and persuaded Pirogov to examine the wounded Garibaldi. Pirogov refused money, but went to Garibaldi and found a bullet not noticed by other world-famous doctors, insisted that Garibaldi leave the climate harmful to his wound, as a result of which the Italian government released Garibaldi from captivity. According to the general opinion, it was N.I. Pirogov who then saved the leg, and, most likely, the life of Garibaldi, who was convicted by other doctors. In his Memoirs, Garibaldi recalls: “The outstanding professors Petridge, Nelaton and Pirogov, who showed generous attention to me when I was in a dangerous state, proved that there are no boundaries for good deeds, for true science in the family of mankind ... "After that Petersburg, there was an attempt on the life of Alexander II by nihilists who admired Garibaldi, and, most importantly, Garibaldi's participation in the war of Prussia and Italy against Austria, which displeased the Austrian government, and the "red" Pirogov was generally dismissed from public service even without a pension.

In the prime of his creative powers, Pirogov retired to his small estate "Cherry" not far from Vinnitsa, where he organized a free hospital. He briefly traveled from there only abroad, and also at the invitation of St. Petersburg University to give lectures. By this time, Pirogov was already a member of several foreign academies. For a relatively long time, Pirogov only left the estate twice: the first time in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war, being invited to the front on behalf of the International Red Cross, and the second time, in -1878 - already at a very old age - he worked at the front for several months during the Russo-Turkish War.

Activities in the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878

Last confession

N. I. Pirogov on the day of death

Pirogov's body was embalmed by his attending physician D. I. Vyvodtsev using the method he had developed, and buried in a mausoleum in the village of Vyshnya near Vinnitsa. In the late 1920s, robbers visited the crypt, damaged the lid of the sarcophagus, stole Pirogov's sword (a gift from Franz Joseph) and a pectoral cross. During the Second World War, during the retreat of the Soviet troops, the sarcophagus with the body of Pirogov was hidden in the ground, while being damaged, which led to damage to the body, which was subsequently restored and re-embalmed.

Officially, the tomb of Pirogov is called the "church-necropolis", the body is located below ground level in the crypt - the basement of the Orthodox church, in a glazed sarcophagus, which can be accessed by those wishing to pay tribute to the memory of the great scientist.

Meaning

The main significance of all Pirogov's activities lies in the fact that with his selfless and often disinterested work he turned surgery into a science, arming doctors with a scientifically based method of surgical intervention.

A rich collection of documents related to the life and work of Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov, his personal belongings, medical instruments, lifetime editions of his works are stored in the funds of the Military Medical Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Of particular interest are the 2-volume manuscript of the scientist “Questions of life. Diary of an old doctor” and a suicide note left by him indicating the diagnosis of his illness.

Contribution to the development of national pedagogy

In the classic article "Questions of Life" he considered the fundamental problems of Russian education. He showed the absurdity of class education, the discord between school and life. He put forward as the main goal of education the formation of a highly moral personality, ready to renounce selfish aspirations for the benefit of society. He believed that for this it was necessary to rebuild the entire education system based on the principles of humanism and democracy. The education system that ensures the development of the individual should be based on scientific basis from primary to higher education, and ensure the continuity of all education systems.

Pedagogical views: considered main idea universal education, the education of a citizen useful to the country; noted the need for social preparation for life of a highly moral person with a broad moral outlook: “ Being human is what education should lead to»; upbringing and education should be in their native language. " Contempt for the native language dishonors the national feeling". He pointed out that the basis for subsequent professional education should be a broad general education; proposed to attract prominent scientists to teaching in higher education, recommended to strengthen the conversations of professors with students; fought for general secular education; urged to respect the personality of the child; fought for the autonomy of higher education.

Criticism of class vocational education: opposed the class school and early utilitarian-professional training, against the early premature specialization of children; believed that it hinders the moral education of children, narrows their horizons; condemned arbitrariness, the barracks regime in schools, thoughtless attitude towards children.

Didactic ideas: teachers should discard old dogmatic ways of teaching and apply new methods; it is necessary to awaken the thought of students, to instill skills independent work; the teacher must draw the attention and interest of the student to the reported material; transfer from class to class should be based on the results of annual performance; in transfer exams there is an element of chance and formalism.

The system of public education according to N. I. Pirogov:

Family

Memory

In Russia

In Ukraine

In Belarus

• Pirogova street in the city of Minsk.

In Bulgaria

The grateful Bulgarian people erected 26 obelisks, 3 rotundas and a monument to N. I. Pirogov in Skobelevsky Park in Plevna. In the village of Bohot, on the site where the Russian 69th military temporary hospital stood, a park-museum “N. I. Pirogov.

In Estonia

• Monument in Tartu - located on the square. Pirogov (est. Pirogovi plats).

In Moldavia

In honor of N. I. Pirogov, a street was named in the city of Rezina, and in Chisinau

In literature and art

• Pirogov - the main character in Kuprin's story "The Wonderful Doctor"
• Pirogov is the main character in the story "The Beginning" and in the story "Bucephalus" by Yuri German.
• Pirogov is a computer program in the science fiction books Ancient: Catastrophe and Ancient: Corporation by Sergei Tarmashev.
• "Pirogov" - a 1947 film, in the role of Nikolai Pirogov - People's Artist of the USSR Konstantin Skorobogatov.

In philately

Notes

1. Sevastopol letters of N. I. Pirogov 1854-1855. - St. Petersburg: 1907
2. Nikolay Marangozov. Nikolai Pirogov c. Duma (Bulgaria), November 13, 2003
3. Gorelova L. E. Mystery of N. I. Pirogov // Russian medical journal. - 2000. - T. 8. - No. 8. - S. 349.
4. Pirogov's last shelter
5. Rossiyskaya Gazeta - Monument to the Living for Saving the Dead
6. Location of the Tomb of N. I. Pirogov on the map of Vinnitsa
7. History of Pedagogy and Education. From the birth of education in primitive society to the end of the 20th century: Tutorial for pedagogical educational institutions / Ed. A. I. Piskunova.- M., 2001.
8. History of Pedagogy and Education. From the origin of education in primitive society to the end of the 20th century: A textbook for pedagogical educational institutions Ed. A. I. Piskunova.- M., 2001.
9. Kodzhaspirova G. M. History of education and pedagogical thought: tables, diagrams, reference notes. - M., 2003. - S. 125
10. Kaluga crossroads. Surgeon Pirogov married a Kaluga woman
11. According to the rector of the Russian State Medical University, Nikolai Volodin (Rossiyskaya Gazeta, August 18, 2010), this was “a technical mistake of the former leadership. Two years ago, at a meeting of the labor collective, it was unanimously decided to return the name of Pirogov to the university. But so far nothing has changed: the charter, which was amended, is still being approved ... It should be adopted in the near future.” As of November 4, 2010, the university is described on the RSMU website as “im. N. I. Pirogov”, however, among the normative documents cited there, there is still the charter of 2003 without mentioning the name of Pirogov.
12. The only one mausoleum in the world, officially recognized (canonized) by the Orthodox Church
13. In tsarist times, there was a Makovsky hospital on Malo-Vladimirskaya Street, where in 1911 the mortally wounded Stolypin was brought and spent his last days (the pavement in front of the hospital was covered with straw). Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Chapter 67 // Red Wheel. - Node I: August the Fourteenth. - M .: Time, . - Vol. 2 (Vol. 8th collection of works). - S. 248, 249. - ISBN 5-9691-0187-7
14. MBALSM "N. I. Pirogov»
15. 1977 (14 October). 100 years from the birth of Academician Nikolai Pirogov in Bulgaria. Hood. N. Kovachev. P. dlbok. Naz. D 13. Sheet (5x5). N. I. Pirogov (Russian surgeon). 2703.13 st. Circulation: 150,000.
16. Chronicle of the life and work of D. I. Mendeleev. - L.: Science. 1984.
17. Vetrova M. D. The myth about the article by N. I. Pirogov “The Ideal of a Woman” [including the text of the article]. // Space and time. - 2012. - No. 1. - S. 215-225.

see also

• Operation Pirogov - Vreden
• Monument to Medical Officials Who Died in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878
• Kade, Erast Vasilyevich - Russian surgeon, Pirogov's assistant in the Crimean campaign, one of the founders of the Pirogov Russian Surgical Society

Bibliography

• Pirogov N.I. Full course applied anatomy of the human body. - St. Petersburg, 1843-1845.
• Pirogov N.I. Report on a journey through the Caucasus 1847-1849 - St. Petersburg, 1849. (Pirogov, N.I. Report on a journey through the Caucasus / Compiled, introductory article and note by S. S. Mikhailov. - M .: State publishing house medical literature, 1952. - 358 p.)
• Pirogov N.I. Pathological anatomy of Asiatic cholera. - St. Petersburg, 1849.
• Pirogov N.I. Anatomical images of the external appearance and position of the organs contained in the three main cavities of the human body. - St. Petersburg, 1850.
• Pirogov N.I. Topographic anatomy according to cuts through frozen corpses. Tt. 1-4. - St. Petersburg, 1851-1854.
• Pirogov N.I. The beginnings of general military field surgery, taken from observations of military hospital practice and memories of the Crimean War and the Caucasian expedition. hh. 1-2. - Dresden, 1865-1866. (M., 1941.)
• Pirogov N.I. university question. - St. Petersburg, 1863.
• Pirogov N.I. Surgical anatomy of arterial trunks and fascia. Issue. 1-2. - St. Petersburg, 1881-1882.
• Pirogov N.I. Works. Tt. 1-2. - SPb., 1887. [T. 1: Questions of life. Diary of an old doctor. T. 2: Questions of life. Articles and notes]. (3rd ed., Kyiv, 1910).
• Pirogov N.I. Sevastopol letters of N. I. Pirogov 1854-1855. - St. Petersburg, 1899.
• Pirogov N.I. Unpublished pages from the memoirs of N. I. Pirogov. (Political confession of N. I. Pirogov) // About the past: a historical collection. - St. Petersburg: Typo-lithography B. M. Wolf, 1909.
• Pirogov N. I. Questions of life. Diary of an old doctor. Edition of the Pirogov t-va. 1910
• Pirogov N. I. Works on experimental, operational and military field surgery (1847-1859) T 3. M.; 1964
• Pirogov N.I. Sevastopol letters and memoirs. - M.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1950. - 652 p. [Contents: Sevastopol Letters; memories of the Crimean War; From the diary of the "Old Doctor"; Letters and documents].
• Pirogov N.I. Selected pedagogical works / Entry. Art. V. Z. Smirnova. - M .: Publishing House of Acad. ped. Sciences of the RSFSR, 1952. - 702 p.
• Pirogov N.I. Selected pedagogical works. - M.: Pedagogy, 1985. - 496 p.

Literature

• Shtreikh S. Ya. N. I. Pirogov. - M .: Journal and newspaper association, 1933. - 160 p. - (Life of remarkable people). - 40,000 copies.
• Porudominsky V.I. Pirogov. - M .: Young Guard, 1965. - 304 p. - (Life of Remarkable People; issue 398). - 65,000 copies.(in trans.)

Links

• Sevastopol letters of N. I. Pirogov 1854-1855. on the website "Runivers"
• Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov “Questions of life. Diary of an old doctor”, Ivanovo, 2008, pdf
• Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov. Questions of life. Diary of an old doctor facsimile reproduction of the second volume of Pirogov's works published in 1910, PDF
• Zakharov I. Surgeon Nikolai Pirogov: a difficult path to faith // St. Petersburg University. - No. 29 (3688), December 10, 2004
• Trotsky L. Political silhouettes: Pirogov
• L. V. Shaposhnikova.

On November 13, 1810, in the family of the treasurer of the food depot of the city of Moscow, Ivan Ivanovich Pirogov, another, rather frequent celebration took place here - the thirteenth child, the boy Nikolai, was born.

The environment in which he spent his childhood was very favorable. Father, a wonderful family man, passionately loved his children. They had more than enough means of living - Ivan Ivanovich, in addition to a considerable salary, was engaged in private affairs. The Pirogovs lived in their own house in Syromyatniki. During the French offensive, their family fled Moscow, waiting out the occupation in Vladimir. Upon returning to the capital, Nikolai's father built a new house with a small but well-groomed garden in which children frolicked.

One of Nikolai's favorite pastimes was playing doctor. She owed her appearance to the illness of his older brother, to whom a well-known metropolitan doctor, Professor Efrem Mukhin, was invited. The atmosphere of visiting a celebrity, coupled with the amazing effect of the treatment, made a strong impression on the nimble and developed boy. After that, little Nikolai often asked someone from the family to lie down in bed, and he himself assumed an important air and felt the pulse of an imaginary patient, looked at his tongue, and then sat down at the table and “wrote” recipes, at the same time explaining how to take medicine. This representation amused loved ones and caused frequent repetitions. As an adult, Pirogov wrote: “I don’t know if I would have received such a desire to play a doctor if, instead of a speedy recovery, my brother had died.”

At the age of six, Nikolai learned to read and write. Reading children's books was a real pleasure for him. The boy especially liked Krylov's fables and " Children's reading» Karamzin. Until the age of nine, his mother was involved in the development of Nikolai, and after that he was transferred into the hands of teachers. At the age of twelve, Pirogov was sent to the private pension of Vasily Kryazhev, which enjoyed a very good reputation. Pirogov kept bright memories of his stay in this place, especially about the director - Vasily Stepanovich. While staying at the boarding house, Nikolai Ivanovich thoroughly studied Russian and French.

In the first two years of the boy's education, many misfortunes befell the Pirogov family - his brother and sister died prematurely, another brother was accused of embezzling state money, and to top it all, the forced resignation of Ivan Ivanovich's father. The financial situation of the Pirogovs was greatly shaken, and Nikolai had to be taken away from the boarding school, where the tuition fee was quite high. Not wanting to spoil the future of the boy, who was very capable, according to teachers, his father turned to Professor Mukhin for advice. After talking with Nikolai, Efrem Osipovich advised his father to prepare the teenager for the entrance exam for the medical faculty of Moscow University.

To prepare for the exam, a certain Feoktistov was invited - a student of medicine, a good-natured and cheerful person. The student moved to the Pirogovs' house and taught Nikolai mainly Latin. Their studies were not burdensome and progressed successfully. Pirogov wrote: “Admission to the university was a colossal event for me. I, like a soldier going to a mortal battle, overcame excitement and stepped in cold blood. The test went well, the examiners were satisfied with the answers of the young man. By the way, Professor Mukhin himself was also present at the exam, which had an encouraging effect on Nikolai.

Moscow University in the twenties of the nineteenth century was a bleak sight. Teachers, with very rare exceptions, were distinguished by a lack of knowledge, mediocrity and bureaucratic attitude to the teaching process, introducing into it, in the words of Pirogov himself, a “comic element”. The teaching was absolutely non-demonstrative, and lectures were given according to the precepts of the 1750s, despite the fact that much newer textbooks were available. The greatest influence on Nikolai Ivanovich was made by Professor of Physiology Efrem Mukhin, who is also a specialist in internal diseases and has a huge practice in Moscow, and Professor of Anatomy Just Loder, an original personality and European celebrity. His science interested Pirogov, and he enthusiastically studied anatomy, but only theoretically, since practical exercises on corpses at that time did not exist.

A much stronger influence on Nicholas was exerted by his older comrades. Due to the remoteness of the Pirogovs' home from the university, the young man spent lunch hours with his former mentor Feoktistov, who lived in the hostel room at number 10 along with five of his comrades. Pirogov said: “What have I not heard enough and seen enough in the tenth issue!” Students talked about medicine, argued about politics, read Ryleev's forbidden poems, and also carried out wild revels after receiving money. The influence of the "tenth number" on Nikolai Ivanovich was enormous, it broadened his horizons and determined the mental and moral turning point in the gifted nature of the future surgeon.

In May 1825, Pirogov's father died suddenly. A month after his death, the Pirogov family lost their house and all their property in order to pay off debts to private creditors and the treasury. Those thrown out onto the street were helped by a second cousin, Andrey Nazaryev, an assessor of the Moscow court, who ceded a mezzanine with three rooms in his house to an orphaned family. Mother and sisters got a job, and Pirogov continued his studies at the university. Fortunately, the cost of education at that time was small - there was no fee for attending lectures, and uniforms had not yet been introduced. Later, when they appeared, the sisters sewed a jacket with a red collar for Nikolai from an old tailcoat, and in order not to reveal non-compliance with the form, he sat in an overcoat during lectures, showing off only a red collar and bright buttons. So, only thanks to the dedication of the sisters and mother, the future luminary of domestic medicine managed to complete the university course.

At the end of 1822, the Imperial order was issued to organize a professorial institute on the basis of the Derpt University, consisting of "twenty natural Russians." This idea was caused by the need to update the composition of professors of four domestic universities by scientifically trained forces. The choice of candidates was left to the councils of these universities. However, before going abroad, all future professors had to visit St. Petersburg at public expense and pass a control test in their specialty at the Academy of Sciences. After Moscow University received a letter from the minister about the selection of candidates, Mukhin remembered his protégé and invited him to go to Dorpat. Pirogov, in view of the fact that the end of the course did not promise him any prospects due to the lack of connections and funds, he immediately agreed and chose surgery as his specialty. Nikolai Ivanovich wrote: “Why not anatomy? Some inner voice suggested that in addition to death, there is also life. In May 1828, Pirogov successfully passed the exams for the doctor of the first department, and two days later, together with the other six candidates from Moscow University, he went to St. Petersburg. Pirogov was examined by Professor Bush, invited from the Medico-Surgical Academy. The exam went well, and a couple of days before the start of the second semester in 1828, Nikolai Ivanovich and his comrades arrived in Dorpat.

In this city, Pirogov met Professor Johann Christian Moyer, who occupied the Department of Surgery at the local university and was, according to Nikolai Ivanovich himself, a highly talented and remarkable person. Moyer's lectures were distinguished by simplicity and clarity of presentation, he also had amazing surgical dexterity - not fussy, not funny, and not rude. The future surgeon lived in Dorpat for five years. He diligently studied surgery and anatomy, and preferred to spend his rare free hours at the Moyers' house. By the way, often visiting the professor, Pirogov met there with outstanding poet Vasily Zhukovsky.

In Dorpat, Pirogov, who had never dealt with practical anatomy before, had to take up operations on corpses. And some time later, trying to solve a number of issues of clinical surgery, he began to experiment with animals. Subsequently, Nikolai Ivanovich always said that before subjecting a living person to surgical intervention, he must find out how the animal's body would endure a similar intervention. The results of his self-study were not long in coming. A competition was announced at the Faculty of Medicine for the best surgical article on arterial ligation. Deciding to write on this topic, Pirogov threw himself into work - for days on end he dissected and tied up the arteries of calves and dogs. The voluminous work presented by him, written entirely in Latin and including drawings from life, was awarded a gold medal, and students and professors started talking about the author.

Independent research in the clinic, the anatomical institute and at home discouraged Nikolai Ivanovich from attending lectures, at which he constantly lost the essence of the story and fell asleep. The young scientist considered attending theoretical classes a waste of time, "stolen from classes with a special subject." Despite the fact that Pirogov practically did not engage in medical sciences that were not related to surgery, in 1831 he successfully passed his doctoral exam, after which he went to Moscow to see his sisters and his old mother. It is curious that for the trip he needed a rather significant amount of money, which Nikolai Ivanovich, living on a small salary and barely making ends meet, did not have. He had to sell his old samovar, his watch, and a few unnecessary books. The proceeds were enough to hire a cart driver who happened to be heading to Moscow.

Upon returning from the capital, Pirogov began writing his doctoral dissertation on the topic of ligation of the abdominal aorta, and on November 30, 1832, the young scientist successfully defended it and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to Germany for two years. In Berlin, Nikolai Ivanovich listened to the lectures of the famous surgeon Rust, worked with Professor Schlemm, led patients in the clinic with Grefe, and also practiced surgery with Dieffenbach, known for his unique plastic surgeries. According to Pirogov, Dieffenbach's ingenuity was limitless - each of his plastic surgeries was an improvisation and was distinguished by something completely new in this area. About another surgeon, Karl Grefe, Pirogov wrote that he went to him "in order to see a virtuoso operator, a true maestro." Grefe's operations amazed everyone with their cleanliness, accuracy, dexterity and fantastic speed. Grefe's assistants knew by heart all his requirements, habits and surgical habits, doing their job without words or conversations. Interns at the Grefe clinic were also allowed to perform surgical interventions, but only by methods developed by Grefe himself, and only by tools invented by him. Pirogov had to do three operations with him, and the German doctor was satisfied with his technique. Pirogov wrote: “However, he did not know that I would have performed all the operations ten times better if I had been allowed to leave his clumsy and inconvenient tools for me.”

Shortly before leaving Berlin, Nikolai Ivanovich received a request from the ministry in which university he would like to take a chair. Without hesitation, Pirogov replied that, of course, in Moscow. He then informed his mother to find him an apartment in advance. With such hopes, in May 1835, Pirogov returned to Russia, but on the way he suddenly fell ill and stopped completely sick in Riga. The trustee of Dorpat University, who at the same time was the Governor-General of the Baltic States, who lived there, with all possible conveniences, placed Pirogov in a huge military hospital, where he recovered throughout the summer. In September, the young surgeon left Riga, but before returning to his homeland, he decided to stop by Dorpat for a few days in order to see Moyer and other acquaintances. Here he learned that he was struck by the appointment of another talented domestic doctor, Fyodor Inozemtsev, to the Moscow department. Pirogov wrote: “How much happiness it gave my poor mother, sisters and me to dream of the day when I finally appear in order to thank them for all their care for me in the difficult time of begging and orphanhood! And suddenly all happy hopes went to dust ... ".

In complete ignorance about his future fate, Nikolai Ivanovich remained in Dorpat, starting to visit the local surgical clinic. In it, Pirogov brilliantly carried out a number of extremely difficult operations, many of which were attended by spectators from among the students of the institute. This is how he described the removal of a stone from one patient: “... a lot of people gathered to see how I would do a lithotomy on a living one. Imitating Graefe, I instructed the assistant to hold each instrument at the ready between the fingers. Many spectators took out their watches. One, two, three - in two minutes the stone was removed. “This is amazing,” they told me from all sides.

Sketch by I. E. Repin for the painting "The arrival of Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov to Moscow for the anniversary on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his scientific activity" (1881). Military Medical Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Some time later, Johann Moyer invited Pirogov to become his successor and take the chair of surgery at Dorpat University. Nikolai Ivanovich gladly accepted the offer, the matter was transferred to the Council of the educational institution, and Pirogov left for St. Petersburg in order to introduce himself to the minister and find out the final decision. In the northern capital, a doctor who does not like to sit idle visited all hospitals and city hospitals, got acquainted with many St. Petersburg doctors and professors of the Medico-Surgical Academy, and performed a number of operations at the Mary Magdalene Hospital and the Obukhov Hospital.

In the end, in March 1836, Pirogov received a chair and was elected to the extraordinary professorship. The motto of the 26-year-old teacher-surgeon was the words: “Let only those who want to learn learn, this is his business. However, whoever wants to learn from me, he is obliged to learn something - this is my business. In addition to extensive theoretical information on any issue, Pirogov tried to give his listeners a visual representation of the material being studied. In particular, at his lectures, Nikolai Ivanovich began to conduct vivisections and experiments on animals, which no one had ever done in Dorpat before.

A characteristic feature that makes Pirogov the greatest honor as a clinical educator is his frank confession to the audience of his own mistakes. In 1838, the scientist published the book "Annals of the Surgical Clinic", containing collections of his lectures, as well as descriptions of interesting cases observed in the clinic during the first years of his professorship. In this confession, Nikolai Ivanovich frankly admitted his mistakes in the treatment of patients. Very soon, Pirogov became a favorite professor among young doctors, and students from completely non-medical faculties came to listen to his witty and informative lectures.

In addition to teaching, Pirogov undertook a scientific trip to Paris, every vacation he made surgical excursions to Revel, Riga and some other Baltic cities. The idea of ​​such surgical raids was born by the scientist in 1837, when requests began to come to him from neighboring provinces to receive patients. In his, as Pirogov himself said, "Genghis Khan's invasions", he took several assistants, and local pastors and doctors publicly announced in advance the arrival of the Dorpat doctor.

Pirogov worked in Dorpat for five years (from 1836 to 1841), during this period he published two volumes of clinical annals and the unique Surgical Anatomy of the Arterial Trunks and Fascia, which made him famous in the medical community. However, the modest position of a professor in a small clinic of a provincial university could not fully satisfy the thirst for vigorous activity that the surgeon felt. And soon Nikolai Ivanovich had the opportunity to change the current state of affairs.

In 1839, the famous professor of the St. Petersburg Medical and Surgical Academy Ivan Bush retired. The department of surgery turned out to be vacant at the academy, and they began to call Pirogov. However, Nikolai Ivanovich considered the surgical professorship without a clinic to be nonsense and for a long time did not agree to take the chair. In the end, he proposed an original combination, which consisted in the creation of a new department of hospital surgery at the academy, as well as the organization, in addition to ordinary, special hospital clinics.

This project was accepted by Kleinmichel, and in 1841 Pirogov moved to the St. Petersburg Medical and Surgical Academy as a professor of applied anatomy and hospital surgery. In addition, he was appointed head of the surgical department of the Second Military Land Hospital, located in the same area and belonging to the same department as the academy.

Having examined his new possessions, Nikolai Ivanovich was horrified. Huge poorly ventilated wards with 70-100 beds were overcrowded with patients. There were no separate rooms for operations. Rags for compresses and poultices paramedics without a twinge of conscience transferred from the wounds of one patient to another. And the products sold were generally below any criticism. Theft reached unprecedented proportions, in front of everyone the meat contractor delivered meat to the apartments of the employees of the hospital office, and the pharmacist sold stocks of medicines to the side.

After the arrival of Pirogov, the administrative "military-scientific swamp" became agitated. The reptiles that lived in it were alarmed and with their combined efforts attacked the violator of their serene life, based on the violation of civil laws and human rights. However, many of them soon became convinced in their own skin that before them was a man of the strongest convictions, a man who could neither be bent nor broken.

On January 28, 1846, a decision was approved to establish a special anatomical institute at the academy, of which Pirogov was also appointed director. In February of the same year, he received a seven-month leave and, having visited Italy, France and Germany, he brought from there all kinds of tools and instruments for the newly founded institute, including microscopes, which had not been in the academy before. Subsequently, this anatomical institute gained great fame in scientific circles and gave Russia a whole galaxy of brilliant surgeons and anatomists.

Pirogov's professorship at the Medico-Surgical Academy lasted 14 years. It was the time of the heyday of his talent, the time of fruitful and versatile practical and scientific activity. Nikolai Ivanovich lectured and supervised the classes of doctors and students, enthusiastically developed the colossal anatomical material at his disposal, continued to practice experimental surgery, experimenting on animals, worked as a consultant to large city hospitals - Mary Magdalene, Obukhov, Maximilian and Petropavlovsk. The surgical clinic headed by him turned into a high school Russian surgical education. This was facilitated by both the extraordinary gift of teaching Nikolai Ivanovich, and his high authority and incomparable technique in performing surgical operations. The famous doctor Vasily Florinsky wrote: “He set the surgical department of the Pirogov Academy to such a height that it had not reached either before or after him.”
At the Anatomical Institute, Nikolai Ivanovich began research on anesthesia with the help of newly discovered chloroform and ether anesthesia.

The surgeon studied the effect of ether on animals, and then on humans. Having successfully introduced ether anesthesia into hospital and private practice, Pirogov thought about the use of etherization in the provision of surgical care on the battlefields. At that time, the invariable theater of military operations was the Caucasus, where the doctor went on July 8, 1847. Upon arrival at the place, the famous surgeon examined military medical institutions and hospitals, introduced doctors to etherization measures, and also performed a number of public operations under anesthesia. It is curious that Pirogov deliberately operated right in the middle of the camp tents, so that the wounded soldiers could be visually convinced of the analgesic effect of ether vapor. Such measures had a very beneficial effect on the fighters, they willingly allowed themselves to be subjected to anesthesia.

In the end, Nikolai Ivanovich arrived at the Samur detachment, which besieged the fortified village of Salta. The siege of this object lasted more than two months, and it was in this place that Pirogov first showed himself as an outstanding military field surgeon. The doctors of the active detachments often had to work under the rifle fire of the highlanders, the wounded were given only the most urgent care, and for operations they were transported to stationary hospitals. Pirogov, at the main apartment of the detachment, organized a primitive field infirmary, in which, together with his assistants, he carried out all dressings and operations. Due to the simplicity of construction, and the infirmary was an ordinary hut made of branches covered with straw, doctors had to work in a bent body position or kneeling. On the days of the assaults, their work shift lasted 12 hours, or even more.

Soon after returning to St. Petersburg, the famous surgeon took on a more peaceful, but no less difficult task - the study of Asiatic cholera that broke out in St. Petersburg in 1848. In order to better understand this at that time little-studied disease, Nikolai Ivanovich organized a special cholera department in his clinic. During the epidemic, he made over 800 autopsies of corpses that died from cholera, and outlined the results of the research in the solid work “Pathological Anatomy of Asiatic Cholera”, which was published in 1850. For this work, provided with an atlas with colored drawings, the Academy of Sciences awarded the surgeon the full Demidov Prize.

And soon the Eastern War began. The Allied troops entered Russia, and the British and French guns fired at Sevastopol. Pirogov, like a true patriot, announced that he was "ready to use all his knowledge and strength on the battlefield for the benefit of the army." His request went through various authorities for a long time, but in the end, thanks to the help of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the first surgeon of Russia in October 1854 went to the theater of operations. Together with him, a whole detachment of doctors, recruited by him mainly in St. Petersburg, set off, and after them the sisters of mercy, consisting of twenty-eight people, left.

In early November, Pirogov reached Sevastopol. He wrote: “I will never forget the first entry into the city. All the way from Bakhchisaray for thirty miles was cluttered with transports with fodder, guns and the wounded. It was raining, the amputees and the sick lay on the carts, shivering from the dampness and moaning; people and animals could hardly move knee-deep in mud; there was carrion at every step.” The bulk of the wounded were transported to Simferopol. There were not enough hospital facilities in the city, and the sick were placed in empty private houses and government buildings, where the wounded had almost no care. In order to at least slightly alleviate their situation, Nikolai Ivanovich left the entire first group of sisters in Simferopol, and he himself went to Sevastopol. There, for the first time, in order to preserve damaged limbs, he began to use plaster cast. Pirogov also owns the development of a system for sorting the wounded, hundreds arriving at the dressing station. Thanks to the introduction of a reasonable and simple sorting, the meager labor force was not scattered, and the work of helping the victims of the battle went sensibly and quickly. By the way, all the time he was in Sevastopol, Pirogov had to work and live under cannon shots, but this had no effect on his mood. On the contrary, eyewitnesses noted that the more tiring and bloody the day was, the more he was disposed to jokes and conversations.

This is how Nikolai Ivanovich himself described the main dressing station during the second bombardment of the city: “Rows of porters were constantly stretching to the entrance, a bloody trail showed them the way. Those brought in whole rows were stacked together with the stretcher on the parquet floor, half an inch soaked in gore; the cries and groans of the sufferers were loudly heard in the hall, the orders of those in charge, the last breaths of the dying .... Blood was shed on three tables during operations; amputated members lay in piles in tubs. Some idea of ​​the scope of the activity that Pirogov showed in Sevastopol is given by the fact that there were about five thousand amputations alone, carried out under his supervision or by him personally, and without his participation - only about four hundred.

On June 1, 1855, Pirogov, morally and physically exhausted, left Sevastopol and returned to St. Petersburg. After spending the summer in Oranienbaum, in September Nikolai Ivanovich again returned to the ruined city, where he found a lot of wounded after the attack on the Malakhov Kurgan. The surgeon transferred his main activity from Sevastopol, occupied by the enemies, to Simferopol, trying with all his might to arrange hospital care, as well as further transportation of crippled people. Considering the unfavorable accumulation of a huge number of wounded in the locations of active troops, Pirogov proposed a unique system for dispersing the sick and placing them in nearby towns and villages. Subsequently, this system was brilliantly applied by the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian war. It is also very curious that a year before the Geneva Convention, an eminent surgeon proposed to make medicine neutral during wars.

Finally, the Eastern War ended. Sevastopol - "Russian Troy" - lay in ruins, and Pirogov, in deep thought, stopped before the completed historical drama. The surgeon and doctor, who literally created the school of surgery in Russia, gave way to a thinker and patriot, whose mind was no longer occupied by methods of treating physical injuries, but by methods of treating moral injuries. Returning from the Crimea in December 1856, Pirogov left the Department of Surgery and resigned from the professorship of the academy.

Soon, the first works of Nikolai Ivanovich devoted to one of the most important life issues - the upbringing of children - appeared on the pages of the Marine Collection. His articles caught the eye of the Minister of Public Education, who in the summer of 1856 offered him the post of trustee of the Odessa educational district. The famous surgeon accepted this offer, stating: "A trustee in my eyes is not so much a leader as a missionary." IN new job Nikolai Ivanovich relied only on his own impressions, not wanting to have intermediaries in the person of the directors. On lessons , Latin, physics and Russian literature - those subjects that Pirogov loved and knew - he sat to the end, often asking questions to students. An eyewitness wrote: “As now, I see a short figure with large gray sideburns, with thick eyebrows, from under which two penetrating eyes peeped through a person, as if giving him a spiritual diagnosis ...”. Pirogov did not stay in Odessa for long, but during this time he managed to organize literary conversations in gymnasiums, which later became very popular. In addition, he did not leave medicine - poor students who did not have money for doctors often turned to him as patients.

N. I. Pirogov on the day of death/center]

In July 1858, Nikolai Ivanovich was transferred to the Kiev district. Shortly after arriving in Kyiv, the new trustee decided to introduce a sense of legitimacy into the pedagogical system. Thanks to his efforts, a committee was convened to organize the "Rules" on the punishments and misdemeanors of gymnasium students. The developed tables of punishments and misdemeanors hung "for general information" in each class of all educational institutions of the district, limiting the arbitrariness and excesses committed by students. In addition, in Kyiv, Pirogov also arranged literary conversations, with his arrival in filling the vacancies of teachers, the role of patronage, which was replaced by competitions, ceased to play. The new trustee significantly expanded the gymnasium libraries and provided many teachers with the opportunity to go abroad for further education.

Unfortunately, soon the "too humane" administrator was left out of work - on March 13, 1861, Pirogov was fired from his post. However, already in 1862, Nikolai Ivanovich was sent abroad to look after young scientists from Russia. This activity was quite to his liking, and he fulfilled his new duties with all vigor, being, in the words of Nikolai Kovalevsky, "for the domestic youth, not a formal boss, but a living example, an embodied ideal." Among the scientists sent abroad were naturalists, physicians, lawyers, and philologists. And they all considered it necessary to seek advice from a renowned surgeon.

In the summer of 1866, Nikolai Ivanovich was released from service and moved to his estate in the village of Vishnya, located near the city of Vinnitsa. Here he was engaged in agricultural work, and also returned to medical practice, organizing in the village a small hospital for thirty patients and several huts to accommodate the operated ones. From different places, even very remote ones, patients came to Pirogov in order to ask the great Russian surgeon for advice or prompt assistance. In addition, Nikolai Ivanovich was constantly invited for consultations.
At the end of the summer of 1870, Pirogov suddenly received a letter from the Red Cross Society with a request to inspect the military sanitary institutions in the theater of the Franco-Prussian war. Already in mid-September, Nikolai Ivanovich went abroad, where he inspected over 70 military hospitals with several thousand wounded. By the way, both in the medical and official fields, the outstanding surgeon everywhere met the most cordial and honorable reception - almost all German professors knew him personally. At the end of his trip, Nikolai Ivanovich handed over to the Red Cross Society a “Report on visiting military sanitary institutions”, after which he again went to his village.

Monument in Moscow

They remembered him again seven years later. Russia led eastern war, and Emperor Alexander II entrusted Pirogov with the task of investigating all sanitary facilities in the rear of the army and in the theater of war, as well as ways to transport the wounded and sick by rail and dirt roads. The surgeon had to inspect the places for feeding and dressing the transported, to get acquainted in detail with the organization of sanitary trains and their effect on the wounded under different conditions. When inspecting the warehouses, Nikolai Ivanovich found out the amount of stocks of necessary aids, medicines, dressings, linen, warm clothes, as well as the timeliness and speed of supplying these items. In total, from September 1877 to March 1878, the 67-year-old surgeon rode over 700 kilometers on a sledge and a cart. The collected material, together with his conclusions, Nikolai Ivanovich outlined in the work “Military Medical Care and Private Assistance in the Theater of War in Bulgaria”, published in 1879.
At the beginning of 1881, non-healing sores appeared in Pirogov's mouth. Professor Sklifosovsky, who was the first to examine them, offered to perform the operation. However, already in Vienna, the famous surgeon Billroth, after a scrupulous examination, declared the ulcers to be benign. Pirogov revived, but his calm did not last long. He spent the summer of 1881 in Odessa, feeling extremely ill. 26 days before his death, in a special letter, an outstanding surgeon made his own diagnosis: "Crawling cancerous ulcer of the oral mucosa." On November 23, Nikolai Ivanovich died.

Based on the materials of the book by Yu.G. Malisa "Nikolai Pirogov. His life, scientific and social activities

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Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov - Russian doctor who made a significant contribution to the development of surgery. He devoted all the years of his life to medicine. It will be quite difficult to talk briefly about Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov, because his entire biography is filled with achievements that significantly influenced the development of medical science. It was he who created the first atlas of topographic anatomy and the founder of military field surgery. Thanks to the foundations that he laid, Russian and then Soviet scientists were able to develop and continue to improve domestic medicine.

Biography of Pirogov

Pirogov was born on November 25, 1810 in Moscow in the family of a treasurer. The future surgeon studied at home with the famous Moscow doctor E. Mukhin. He began to study with young Pirogov, because he noticed the boy's abilities. When Nikolai Ivanovich reached the age of 14, at such a young age he was able to enter the medical faculty of Moscow University. Studying was easy for Pirogov. The future father of Russian surgery even managed to earn extra money to help his family. A special role in his life was played by the work of a dissector (assistant professor of anatomy) in the anatomical theater. It was there that Pirogov realized that he wanted to become a surgeon.

After graduating from the university, Nikolai Ivanovich was enrolled in the Yuryev University of Tartu. In 1833 he defended his doctoral dissertation and became professor of surgery. In his work, the father of Russian surgery studied and described the location of the human abdominal aorta, circulatory disorders during its ligation, circulatory pathways with its obstruction, and explained the causes of postoperative complications. After that, Pirogov was sent to the University of Berlin for further education.

In 1836, Nikolai Ivanovich returned to Russia and was appointed professor of theoretical and practical surgery at the Imperial Dorpat University. There he wrote an essay "Surgical anatomy of arterial trunks and fascia".

In 1841, Pirogov moved to St. Petersburg and headed the Department of Surgery there at the Medico-Surgical Academy. He worked in the new city for 10 years. During this period, he created the first Surgical Clinic in Russia, where he founded a new direction in medicine - hospital surgery. Soon, Nikolai Ivanovich was appointed director of the Tool Plant, where he is actively involved in development of surgical instruments.

Looking for the best teaching methods, Pirogov comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to conduct anatomical studies on frozen corpses - "Ice Anatomy". So the surgeon created a new discipline - topographic anatomy. Several years of such research allowed Pirogov to create an anatomical atlas "Topographic anatomy, illustrated by cuts made through a frozen human body in three directions". Thanks to this, surgeons could perform operations with minimal injury to the patient.

In 1846, the father of Russian surgery became a corresponding member of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In 1847, Pirogov left for the Caucasus to join the army. There he was the first to use bandages soaked in starch for dressing. In the same place, Pirogov was the first in history used ether anesthesia in the field as anesthesia during the operation (the first operation under anesthesia was performed on February 7, 1847 by a friend of Nikolai Ivanovich F.I. Inozemtsev).

In 1853 the Crimean War began. Pirogov was assigned to the active army and sent to Sevastopol. During this war surgeon first used a plaster cast, which saved many soldiers from further complications and amputation of limbs. Nikolai Ivanovich was the initiator of the creation of sisters of mercy. It is he laid the foundations of military field surgery, including sorting the victims at the first dressing station, depending on the severity of the injuries. Some had to be operated on immediately, others had to be evacuated to the hospital. This system was also used during the Great Patriotic War. N.N. Burdenko subsequently improved surgical care and the process of removing the wounded from the battlefield.

Russian empire lost in the Crimean War. Returning to St. Petersburg, Pirogov told Alexander II about the problems in the troops. The emperor was dissatisfied with such a statement, and the surgeon fell out of favor. Nikolai Ivanovich was sent to Odessa, where he was appointed a trustee from the children's educational district. In this position Pirogov tried to reform the existing education system. But this led to a conflict with the authorities, and the surgeon had to leave his post.

In 1862 Nikolai Ivanovich was sent to Germany. There he supervised the studying Russian candidates for professorship. It was at that time that Pirogov was treated by Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Since 1866, the honored surgeon lived in his estate in the village of Vyshnia in Vinnitsa. There he opened a hospital, a pharmacy, and gave the land to the peasants. From there, he traveled only abroad or to the university in St. Petersburg to give lectures. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and Russian-Turkish war(1877-1878) Pirogov went to the front as a consultant on military medicine and surgery.

In 1881, Nikolai Ivanovich became the fifth honorary citizen of Moscow. In the same year, he completed work on the Diary of an Old Doctor. On May 24, 1881, N.V. Sklifosovsky diagnosed Pirogov with cancer of the upper jaw. Shortly before death Nikolai Ivanovich proposed a new method of embalming deceased. November 23, 1881 Pirogov died. His body was embalmed using this technique and placed in a crypt on the estate. The Church approved this action. Today, the estate has become a museum, and the body is still there.

Pirogov Nikolai Ivanovich: pedagogical ideas

Pirogov paid Special attention development of approaches to the organization of training. The basic principles were considered by the surgeon in the article "Issues of Surgery":

• Class education - absurdity
• The problem of the existence of discord between school and life
• The main goal should be the education of a highly moral personality, striving to create the benefits of society

Pirogov proposed to rebuild the education system and emphasize humanism and democracy. The pedagogical views of Nikolai Ivanovich included several principles:

• Raising a citizen useful to the country
• Education of a person with a broad moral outlook
• Education and education in the native language
• Involvement of scientists in teaching in schools
• General secular education
• Respect for the child's personality
• Autonomy of the Higher School
• Refusal of early premature specialization of the child. Pirogov believed that this slows down moral education and narrows the horizons
• Condemnation of arbitrariness and barracks regime in educational institutions
• Teaching students the skills of independent work
• Attracting interest in the material
• Transfer from class to class based on academic performance
• Consideration of corporal punishment of a child as a means that humiliates a child and is useless in terms of understanding and evaluating one's actions

The system of public education according to Pirogov:

• Elementary (primary) school
  Duration of study: 2 years
  Subjects: arithmetic, grammar;
• Incomplete secondary school of two types:
  Classical gymnasium
  Duration of study: 4 years
  general educational character;
  Real progymnasium
  Duration of study: 4 years;
• Secondary school of two types:
  classical gymnasium
  Study period: 5 years
  General educational character: Latin, Greek, Russian languages, literature, mathematics;
  Real gymnasium
  Duration of study: 3 years
  Applied character: professional subjects;
• Graduate School: Universities, Higher Education Institutions

Interesting facts from the life of Pirogov and after his death

• In 1852, Nikolai Ivanovich performed an osteoplastic amputation of the lower leg. This led to the development of the doctrine of amputation.
• Pirogov was cured by Giuseppe Garibaldi. Only Nikolai Ivanovich was able to detect a bullet in the wound. He recommended not to hurry with the extraction and wait. The surgeon wrote: "The bullet, sitting near the outer ankle, then approached the hole located near the inner condyle." The bullet was soon removed easily.
• In the 1920s, Pirogov's crypt was desecrated. A sword (a gift from Franz Joseph) and a pectoral cross were stolen.
• The beginning of the Great Patriotic War prevented the scheduled restoration and embalming of the surgeon's body in 1941. The initiator of the restoration of the body was E. I. Smirnov.
• The Tretyakov Gallery keeps a portrait of Pirogov, painted by I. E. Repin.

Pirogov's works

• "Complete Course in Applied Anatomy of the Human Body", 1843-1845

The future great doctor was born on November 27, 1810 in Moscow. His father Ivan Ivanovich Pirogov served as treasurer. He had fourteen children, most of whom died in infancy. Of the six survivors, Nikolai was the youngest.

An acquaintance of the family helped him get an education - a well-known Moscow doctor, professor of Moscow University E. Mukhin, who noticed the boy's abilities and began to work with him individually. And already at the age of fourteen, Nikolai entered the medical faculty of Moscow University, for which he had to add two years to himself, but he passed the exams no worse than his older comrades. Pirogov studied easily. In addition, he had to constantly earn extra money to help his family. Finally, Pirogov managed to get a job as a dissector in the anatomical theater. This job gave him invaluable experience and convinced him that he should become a surgeon.

After graduating from the university one of the first in terms of academic performance, Pirogov went to prepare for a professorship at one of the best at that time in Russia, Yuriev University in the city of Tartu. Here, in the surgical clinic, Pirogov worked for five years, brilliantly defended his doctoral dissertation, and at the age of twenty-six became a professor of surgery. In his dissertation, he was the first to study and describe the location of the abdominal aorta in humans, circulatory disorders during its ligation, the circulatory pathways in case of its obstruction, and explained the causes of postoperative complications. After five years in Derpt, Pirogov went to Berlin to study, illustrious surgeons, to whom he went with a respectfully bowed head, read his dissertation, hastily translated into German. He found a teacher who, more than others, combined everything that he was looking for in the surgeon Pirogov, not in Berlin, but in Göttingen, in the person of Professor Langenbeck. The Göttingen professor taught him the purity of surgical techniques.

Returning home, Pirogov fell seriously ill and was forced to stay in Riga. As soon as Pirogov got up from the hospital bed, he undertook to operate. He began with rhinoplasty: he carved out a new nose for a noseless barber. Plastic surgery was followed by the inevitable lithotomies, amputations, removal of tumors. Having set off from Riga to Dorpat, he learned that the Moscow chair promised to him had been given to another candidate. Pirogov received a clinic in Dorpat, where he created one of his most significant works - "The Surgical Anatomy of Arterial Trunks and Fascia".

Pirogov supplied the description of operations with drawings. Nothing like the anatomical atlases and tables that were used before him. Finally, he goes to France, where five years earlier, after a professorial institute, the authorities did not want to let him go. In Parisian clinics, Nikolai Ivanovich does not find anything unknown. It is curious: as soon as he was in Paris, he hurried to the well-known professor of surgery and anatomy Velpo and found him reading "Surgical Anatomy of the Arterial Trunks and Fascia".

In 1841, Pirogov was invited to the Department of Surgery at the Medical and Surgical Academy of St. Petersburg. Here the scientist worked for more than ten years and created the first surgical clinic in Russia. In it, he founded another branch of medicine - hospital surgery. Nikolai Ivanovich is appointed director of the Tool Factory, and he agrees. Now he comes up with tools that any surgeon will use to perform the operation well and quickly. He is asked to accept a consultant position in one hospital, another, a third, and he again agrees. In the second year of his life in St. Petersburg, Pirogov fell seriously ill, poisoned by hospital miasma and the bad air of the dead. I couldn't get up for a month and a half. He felt sorry for himself, poisoned his soul with sorrowful thoughts about years lived without love and lonely old age. He went over in his memory all those who could bring him family love and happiness. The most suitable of them seemed to him Ekaterina Dmitrievna Berezina, a girl from a well-born, but collapsed and greatly impoverished family. A hurried modest wedding took place.

Pirogov had no time - great things were waiting for him. He simply locked his wife within the four walls of a rented and, on the advice of acquaintances, furnished apartment. Ekaterina Dmitrievna died in the fourth year of marriage, leaving Pirogov two sons: the second cost her her life. But in the difficult days of grief and despair for Pirogov, a great event happened - his project of the world's first Anatomical Institute was approved by the highest.

On October 16, 1846, the first test of ether anesthesia took place. In Russia, the first operation under anesthesia was performed on February 7, 1847 by Pirogov's comrade from the professorial institute, Fedor Ivanovich Inozemtsev.

Soon, Nikolai Ivanovich took part in hostilities in the Caucasus. Here the great surgeon performed about 10,000 operations under ether anesthesia.

After the death of Ekaterina Dmitrievna Pirogov was left alone. "I have no friends," he admitted with his usual frankness. And at home, the boys, sons, Nikolai and Vladimir were waiting for him. Pirogov twice unsuccessfully tried to marry for convenience, which he did not consider it necessary to hide from himself, from acquaintances, it seems that from the girls planned to be the bride.

In a small circle of acquaintances, where Pirogov sometimes spent evenings, he was told about the twenty-two-year-old Baroness Alexandra Antonovna Bistrom. Pirogov proposed to Baroness Bistrom. She agreed.

When the Crimean War began in 1853, Nikolai Ivanovich considered it his civic duty to go to Sevastopol. He was appointed to the active army. While operating on the wounded, Pirogov for the first time in the history of medicine used a plaster cast, which made it possible to speed up the healing process of fractures and saved many soldiers and officers from ugly curvature of the limbs. On his initiative, the Russian army introduced new form medical care - there were sisters of mercy. Thus, it was Pirogov who laid the foundations of military field medicine, and his developments formed the basis for the activities of military field surgeons in the 19th-20th centuries; they were used by Soviet surgeons during the Great Patriotic War.

After the fall of Sevastopol, Pirogov returned to St. Petersburg, where, at a reception at Alexander II, he reported on the mediocre leadership of the army by Prince Menshikov. The tsar did not want to heed the advice of Pirogov, and from that moment Nikolai Ivanovich fell out of favor. He was forced to leave the Medico-Surgical Academy. Appointed as a trustee of the Odessa and Kyiv educational districts, Pirogov is trying to change the school system that existed in them. Naturally, his actions led to a conflict with the authorities, and the scientist again had to leave his post. In 1862-1866. supervised young Russian scientists sent to Germany. At the same time, Giusepe Garibaldi successfully operated. From 1866 he lived on his estate in the village. Cherry, where he opened a hospital, a pharmacy and donated land to the peasants. He traveled from there only abroad, and also at the invitation of St. Petersburg University to give lectures. By this time, Pirogov was already a member of several foreign academies. As a consultant on military medicine and surgery, he went to the front during the Franco-Prussian (1870-1871) and Russian-Turkish (1877-1878) wars.

In 1879-1881. worked on The Diary of an Old Doctor, completing the manuscript shortly before his death. In May 1881, the fiftieth anniversary of Pirogov's scientific work was solemnly celebrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, at that time the scientist was already terminally ill, and in the summer of 1881 he died on his estate. But by his own death, he managed to immortalize himself. Shortly before his death, the scientist made another discovery - he proposed a completely new way of embalming the dead. Pirogov's body was embalmed, placed in a crypt and is now preserved in Vinnitsa, which included an estate turned into a museum. I.E. Repin painted a portrait of Pirogov, located in the Tretyakov Gallery. After the death of Pirogov, the Society of Russian Doctors was founded in his memory, which regularly convened the Pirogov Congresses. The memory of the great surgeon is preserved to this day. Every year, on his birthday, a prize and a medal named after him are awarded for achievements in the field of anatomy and surgery. The name of Pirogov is the 2nd Moscow, Odessa and Vinnitsa medical institutes.