Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1753

NIKOLAI IVANOVICH PIROGOV (1810-1881) Klinische Chirurgie. Breitkopf & Härtel 1854 Vol. I: [4] 111 [1] pp., 1 fold. plate; Vol. II: [4] 44 pp., 6 fold. plates; Vol. III: [2] 82 pp. 23 cm.

Medical historians rank Pirogov, Russia's foremost surgeon, as one of the world's greatest military surgeons. He was educated in Moscow where he received his medical degree in 1827 and then entered the University of Dorpat in Estonia in order to secure additional medical training. He received another medical degree from Dorpat and did postgraduate work at Berlin and Göttingen. He became professor of surgery at Dorpat in 1836 and taught there until 1840 when he assumed the chair of surgery at St. Petersburg's Medico-Chirurgical Academy. Pirogov worked unceasingly to improve the state of Russian medical education and finally resigned from St. Petersburg in 1856 because of dissatisfaction with the administrative methods of the Russian military. He then entered the Ministry of Education where he held several key positions before his retirement. During the Caucasus military campaign in 1847, Pirogov became the first in Europe to administer ether for surgical anesthesia. He later served as surgeon general during the Crimean War and was instrumental in establishing a female nurse corps to improve the care of the Russian sick and wounded. He was an early advocate of the importance of hygiene and emphasized it in his classic work on military surgery. Pirogov was one of the first to prepare cross-sections of frozen human bodies using only a hammer, chisel, and saw. He recognized their educational importance and published a noteworthy atlas of topographical anatomy featuring many of his preparations. This work on clinical surgery contains several of Pirogov's major contributions to surgery translated from the Russian. Among the contents are his well-known osteoplastic method for amputation of the foot.

Cited references: Garrison-Morton 5601; Waller 7465

Gift of John Martin, M.D.