April 6 (according to the old style - March 25) marks the 182th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding surgeon and scientist, Professor Nikolai Vasilievich Sklifosovsky. He saved thousands of lives, working as a military field surgeon, introduced the revolutionary principles of antisepsis and asepsis for that time, for the first time performed operations that were considered impossible before him, but the genius of surgery was unable to help his closest people …
The childhood and youth of the future scientist were spent in poverty and hardship. He was born in 1836 in the Kherson province. Nikolai was the 9th child in the family, and after him three more were born. His father was a minor official and could not support such a large family. Therefore, the parents were forced to send several children, including Nikolai, to the Odessa orphanage. Despite the difficult living conditions and the lack of attention and care of loved ones, Nikolai graduated from high school with a silver medal and entered the medical faculty of Moscow University "on state support." He became one of the best students, despite the fact that during the first operation he saw Sklifosovsky lost consciousness.
After graduation, Sklifosovsky returned to Odessa and got a job in one of the hospitals as a resident of the surgical department. At the age of 27, he already defended his doctoral dissertation. Sklifosovsky became a member of several military campaigns - he worked in the field hospitals of the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, visited the fronts of the Balkan and Russian-Turkish wars. They had to operate around the clock, under the roar of cannon fire. The surgeon's wife, who followed him to the front, recalled: “After three or four surgeries in a row, often at a high temperature in the operating room, after breathing carbolic acid, ether, iodoform for several hours, he came home with a terrible headache, which he got rid of by drinking a little a cup of very strong coffee."
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Sklifosovsky's innovations were invaluable: he saved thousands of lives by introducing the disinfection of surgical instruments, operating field and medical clothing, and developed the Sklifosovsky castle, which made it possible to unite crushed bones. Thanks to his technique, the cases of postoperative infections and complications were almost completely excluded, the mortality rate decreased significantly. The operations performed by Sklifosovsky for the first time have become classic in world surgery.
At the same time, the scientist's innovative developments were at first questioned and criticized by colleagues. So, Professor I. Korzhenevsky, ironically spoke at a lecture about a new method of disinfection: "Isn't it funny that such a large person like Sklifosovsky is afraid of such small creations as bacteria, which he does not even see!"
Left - Sklifosovsky with his youngest daughter Tamara. On the right is the surgeon's wife Sophia.
However, all these hardships and professional difficulties will seem only minor troubles compared to the troubles that Sklifosovsky had to endure in his personal life. At 24, his wife Lisa died of typhus, leaving three children. After some time, the surgeon married a second time. His chosen one was the governess Sophia, who understood him perfectly, supported him in everything and accompanied him everywhere, was engaged in raising children and housekeeping. She gave her husband four more children.
The fate of Sklifosovsky's wife and children was tragic. Not a single child lived a long and happy life: his son Boris died in infancy, and his brother Konstantin died at the age of 16 from kidney tuberculosis. The eldest son Vladimir, while studying at the institute, became interested in politics and became a member of a terrorist organization that instructed him to kill the governor of Poltava, who was a friend of their family and often visited their house. Realizing that he would not be able to commit the murder of an old acquaintance and fearing the condemnation of the "comrades", Vladimir committed suicide. The death of his third son finally knocked Sklifosovsky down. He left medicine, went to his Yakovtsy estate in the Poltava province and took up gardening. He survived his son by only 4 years: in 1904, after suffering a stroke, the great surgeon died at the age of 68.
The grave of the surgeon in Yakivtsi.
However, troubles continued to haunt his family. Son Nikolai died during the Russo-Japanese War, son Alexander disappeared during the Civil War. In 1918, the Bolsheviks, despite Lenin's personal order that repression would not apply to the Sklifosovsky family (after all, he received the rank of general for his medical activities on the battlefields), they executed the paralyzed widow of the surgeon and his daughter Tamara. They hacked Sophia with shovels, and hanged Tamara in the courtyard of the house. And in 1923 the Soviet government gave the name of Sklifosovsky to the Moscow Institute of Emergency Medicine.
Research Institute of Emergency Medicine N. V. Sklifosovsky.
