Nikolay Burdenko

Nikolay Nilovich Burdenko (Russian: Никола́й Ни́лович Бурде́нко; 22 May [O.S. 3 June] 1876 – 11 November 1946) was a Russian and Soviet surgeon, the founder of Russian neurosurgery. He was Surgeon-General of the Red Army (1937–1946), an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (from 1939), an academician and the first director of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1944–1946), a Hero of Socialist Labor (from 1943), Colonel General of medical services, and a Stalin Prize winner (1941). He was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, First World War, Winter War and the German-Soviet War.

Nikolay Burdenko was born 3 June 1876 in the village of Kamenka in Nizhnelomovsky Uyezd of Penza Governorate. In 1891, he entered to the theological seminary and after graduation in 1897 he went to Tomsk where has been admitted to the recently opened Tomsk State University. After finishing two courses, Burdenko was excluded from the university for the participation in the student revolutionary movement and was forced to leave Tomsk.

In 1906, he graduated from the University of Tartu and became in 1910 the professor of that university. In 1918, he became the professor of the University of Voronezh; from 1923, he was the professor of the medical department of the Moscow State University. This department was in 1930 reorganized into the 1st Moscow Medical Institute. Here he led until the end of his life the surgical clinic of the faculty, which now bears his name. Since 1929, Burdenko was the director of the neurosurgical clinic of the X-ray institute of the People's Commissariat of Public Health, on the base of which in 1934 was founded the world's first neurosurgical institute.

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