The unknown Zabludovsky: his early years

Abstract

This article presents material for an academic biography of the leading Russian medical historian Professor Pavel Zabludovsky (1894–1993), based on an analysis of his unpublished memoirs and covering his early life – childhood,youth, student years at the University of Novorossiya, and service in World War I. The son of an engineering tech-nologist who worked at sugar refineries in Podolia, Zabludovsky, after finishing secondary school in 1911, entered the Department of Natural Sciences of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Novorossiya in Odessa. After a year, however, he transferred to the Faculty of Medicine, where some of the most outstanding professors of the day taught – physiologist Bronislav Verigo, ophthalmologist Vladimir Filatov, pharmacologist Magnus Blauberg, and morphologist Nikolai Batuev. They encouraged him to study several foreign languages seriously, inspired his interest in medicine, and in general had a huge influence on his development as a scholar.
abludovsky had not yet been awarded his degree when World War I broke out, and he was called up to the army and posted to the front as an zauryad- vrach. Until suffering shell shock near Baranovichi (Baranavichy) in 1916,he served as a junior doctor on the Russian Empire’s Western and Southwestern fronts, and from autumn 1916 in evacuation hospitals and Red Cross mobile field and staging infirmaries on those fronts. He eventually received his doctor’s degree in 1919, after passing the state exams at the University of Kiev. Zabludovsky’s memoirs not only provide the information required for his academic biography: his accounts of the people he encountered and the events he took part in convey the spirit of that difficult period in our country’s history.