A Doctor with a capital D
The N. N. Burdenko House-Museum on the grounds of the Penza Regional Hospital named after him
“Please don’t write about me that I come from a peasant family, that my ancestors practically wandered the world…”
N. Burdenko
N. Burdenko
Glorious people of the Russian land. Truly, sometimes you just have to get sick to gain access to... interesting journalistic information. And sometimes it's easy to get sick, but getting treatment "where you need it" is difficult. But this time I was lucky. The Burdenko Penza Regional Hospital was on duty, and that's where the ambulance took me. Some people endure it for three days. They wait for it to be on duty and don't want to go anywhere else! Although the hospital is very old, it's full of state-of-the-art buildings, and the doctors (and their equipment) are very good. The surgeons are absolutely hand-picked "grenadiers," as tall as the lintel. Only one was short! There's even one black doctor. And obviously a good specialist, otherwise what would he be doing there among such "pros"? It's a complete "Hindi-Rusi bhai-band," but in the good sense of the word. So, three or four days later, you're back on your feet. In good weather, you can walk around the grounds. And there is also a house-museum of N. N. Burdenko, who was included in history our medicine a very worthy page with its name.
Bust on the hospital grounds
I'd known about this museum for a long time. Many Penza residents had seen it through the bars of the hospital grounds. They'd seen it, but I doubt they'd visited it, because you have to go through the hospital entrance, which is both far and inconvenient. Incidentally, I'd been there before, but with a very specific purpose: to photograph the preserved head of a notorious Penza gangster from the 20s, nicknamed Alle. There was an article about him on VO with photographs of this head, and, what's more, today the photographs tagged in it are unique, because this head is no longer in the museum. At the request of his relatives, it was finally buried!
And this is his portrait on one of the floors... Under the portrait are the orders he was awarded.
But the museum itself is intact and well-appointed, and its director, Darya Vladimirovna Suchkova, greeted me with more than a warm welcome, giving me a personal tour and telling me many interesting things. And, taking advantage of the lack of crowds, I took plenty of photos, although, understandably, the exhibits behind glass were traditionally difficult to photograph.
A model of the Burdenko family home. I love models like this. They tell a lot…
Well, it makes sense for me to repeat this story in a purely journalistic interpretation and tell about the truly heroic fate of a man from the Penza region, a doctor with a capital D, Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko.
One of the rooms. As you can see, people lived in that house quite crampedly…
He was born on May 22 (June 3), 1876, in the village of Kamenka, Nizhnelomovsky District, Penza Governorate, to a family of peasants. His grandfather was a serf who had been freed from serfdom.
Here is this document on stamped paper, certifying the transition of the future doctor’s grandfather to a free state!
But Father Nil Karpovich, the son of a serf, became a clerk, and then even the manager of a small manor house and, according to his passport, a "Penza bourgeois"! In other words, he rose quite well for the times. He sent his son to study at a zemstvo school (1881-1885) and dreamed of his son becoming a priest. Thus, young Burdenko found himself at the Penza Theological School (1886-1890), then at the Penza Theological Seminary (1891-1897). But… he became disillusioned with his "divine career" and, in September 1897, enrolled in the medical faculty of Tomsk University.
This is how Nikolai studied.
The seminary building. It's in very poor condition today, and naturally, there's no longer any hospital in it!
His teachers and mentors
A very joyful document for Nikolai!
The tsarist government's obvious concern for young and immature minds!
And then it happened that, although Nikolai signed a certain paper in the photograph, he nevertheless took part in the student strike of 1899 and was expelled from the university. However, he applied for reinstatement and returned to the university. In 1901, his name reappeared on the list of strikers; according to some sources, it was there by chance. However, Burdenko was still forced to leave Tomsk and, on October 11, 1901, transfer to Yuryev University (now the University of Tartu, Estonia), to the fourth year of the medical faculty. There, apparently, there was "more freedom." But it's also worth noting that the tsarist regime didn't persecute young rebels all that harshly. It didn't close off the opportunity for them to study...
While pursuing his studies, Nikolai Burdenko was also active in the student political movement. Eventually, after yet another student meeting, he was forced to interrupt his studies at the university. At the invitation of the zemstvo, he arrived in the Kherson province to treat an epidemic of typhus and other acute childhood diseases. Here, by his own account, Burdenko first encountered practical surgery. After working for almost a year in a colony for children with tuberculosis, and thanks to the help of his professors, he was able to return to Yuryev University, where he began working as an assistant in the surgical clinic.
From January 1904, he volunteered as a physician's assistant in the Russo-Japanese War. During a battle near the village of Wafangou, while evacuating wounded soldiers under enemy fire, he was shell-shocked and wounded. For his heroism, he was awarded the St. George's Cross, his first military decoration. In 1906, he finally graduated from Yuryev University in Tartu, Estonia, and received his medical degree with honors.
Here is this diploma!
This is how handsome the young doctor Burdenko arrived in the city of Penza.
For several months in 1907, he worked at the Penza Provincial Zemstvo Hospital, while gathering material for his dissertation. He filled in for his friend from the front, Dr. V.K. Trofimov (senior physician at the Penza Provincial Zemstvo Hospital from 1874 to 1897), who had gone on leave. "served as head of a 100-bed surgical unit".
His words…
And he lived here...
His colleagues
In 1909, he defended his dissertation, "Materials on the Consequences of Bandaging...." In 1910, Burdenko was already a private assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at Yuryev University, and then an extraordinary professor in the Department of Operative Surgery and Topographic Anatomy.
Doctorate in medical sciences!
In July 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, Burdenko was appointed assistant to the head of the Red Cross medical unit. In September 1914, he joined the active army as a consultant to the medical unit of the Northwestern Front. He participated in the offensive on East Prussia, oversaw the evacuation of the wounded during the Russian army's retreat from Kovno, and performed surgery on the wounded during the Warsaw-Ivangorod Offensive.
In the summer of 1917, he was shell-shocked for the second time at the front. After treatment, he returned to Yuryev University and was elected head of the surgery department there. After Yuryev was occupied by German troops, the German army command offered N. N. Burdenko a chair at the university, but he declined and evacuated to Voronezh in June 1918.
Burdenko's article on the effects of warhead gases
After the Revolution, Burdenko became one of the main organizers of the hospital service of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. He trained nursing staff at the courses he founded and organized civilian healthcare. From 1918, he headed the surgical clinic at Voronezh University. In 1923, he was invited to Moscow to head the Department of Topographic Anatomy and Operative Surgery at the First Moscow State University.
I noticed this chair at the Burdenko Museum. I had exactly the same ones in my old house, built in 1882.
From 1924, Burdenko served as director of the faculty surgical clinic at 1st Moscow State University, where he organized the neurosurgical department in 1924. He also became one of the founders of the Central Institute of Neurosurgery, and served as its permanent director from 1934 to 1946. In 1946, this institute was named after N. N. Burdenko. In 1934, Burdenko began working as a consulting surgeon at the Red Army military hospital (in 1946, the hospital was named after Academician N. N. Burdenko). During the Soviet-Finnish War (1939-1940), he again returned to the front, where he operated and organized surgical care for the troops of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.
His words, his memories...
His books…
His office…
From the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), N. N. Burdenko served as the chief surgeon of the Red Army. He personally performed several hundred complex operations on wounded soldiers and commanders. In 1941, he suffered his first stroke. While still recovering from his illness, he consulted with the wounded arriving from the front and, again, performed numerous operations. He developed the scientific and organizational foundations of military field surgery. Under his leadership, uniform principles for the treatment of gunshot wounds were introduced on all fronts of the Great Patriotic War. During the war, N. N. Burdenko proposed effective methods for the surgical treatment of combat injuries and developed a theory of wounds. In May 1944, he developed detailed instructions for the prevention and treatment of shock (one of the most severe complications of war injuries). He actively advocated for the introduction and widespread use of penicillin and sulfidine in military hospitals.
Clock from the house-museum
A piano and a kerosene lamp
And here is the result of all these and many other measures carried out at that time with his participation. Soviet doctors managed to return 72,3% of wounded soldiers and 90,6% of sick soldiers to duty, which amounts to a total of approximately eighteen million men (with the standard strength of the Red Army being 7,5 million) and is an absolute record in the history of war. For comparison, in the Wehrmacht, less than half of the wounded were returned to duty. According to statistics, each new soldier fought on average for only 10-12 days, after which he died or, having been wounded, was evacuated to the rear, only to return to the active army after treatment. Thus, Red Army medical facilities returned 85% of the soldiers and commanders admitted for treatment to duty. Thanks to the efforts of military doctors, no serious outbreaks of infectious diseases, much less epidemics, were recorded at the front or in the rear during the war.
Tools that N. N. Burdenko could have used
These are definitely his glasses.
One of the military orders of N. N. Burdenko
On the initiative of N. N. Burdenko and in accordance with a plan he personally developed, the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences was established on June 30, 1944. On December 24, 1944, he was elected its first president and became the founder of the Soviet-Russian school of neurosurgery. He developed treatment methods for oncology of the central and autonomic nervous system and pathologies of cerebral circulation. He performed operations to treat brain tumors, pioneering the widespread use of such operations (having developed original methods for their implementation). He was a member of the editorial board of the multi-volume publication "The Experience of Soviet Medicine in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945."
On January 12, 1944, Burdenko was appointed chairman of the "Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest (near Smolensk)" (under the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders, chaired by N. M. Shvernik). In 1943, the German occupiers discovered the graves of approximately 4,3 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, out of 21 Polish prisoners executed by the NKVD in accordance with the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on March 5, 1940. The Germans organized an extensive investigation involving the international community and foreign experts, the results of which were actively used in propaganda. The Soviet side, in turn, blamed the Germans themselves for this crime. After the liberation of Smolensk, a commission for a "preliminary investigation" of the Katyn case was created under the leadership of the People's Commissar of State Security Merkulov (in 1940, one of the members of the "special troika" that passed sentences) and the Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Kruglov. Burdenko apparently sincerely believed the Germans were guilty of the massacre. On September 22, 1943, he wrote to V. M. Molotov, reporting that the methods of executing Soviet citizens by the German occupiers in Orel were identical to the method of executing Polish officers described in German publications.
Photos from those years
On January 13, 1944, at the first meeting of the Special Commission, held in the building of the Neurosurgical Institute in Moscow, Burdenko stated:
The focus of our commission's work is establishing the timing and methods of the murders... The murder methods are identical to the methods I discovered in Orel and those discovered in Smolensk. Furthermore, I have information about the murder of 700 mentally ill people in Voronezh. The mentally ill were exterminated within five hours using the same method. All these methods of murder reveal German handiwork, as I will prove in time.
Ultimately, the Soviet indictment for the "Katyn affair" at the Nuremberg Trials was brought against Hermann Göring. However, the Soviet side failed to produce a single witness who could testify against the German witnesses, refute their testimony, and corroborate Burdenko's version of events. As a result, the outcome of the hearings was unanimously assessed by observers as a failure of the Soviet version, so much so that the Katyn episode did not even figure in the final verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Consequently, State Security General G.S. Zhukov, the former commissioner for Polish affairs, was forced to admit that the Burdenko Commission had failed to live up to expectations and "ineptly covered up the case".
Apparently, this political setback had a profound impact on N. N. Burdenko. Already in July 1945, he suffered a second stroke, and in the summer of 1946, a third. He died on November 11, 1946, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
In 1958, a bust of the scientist by sculptor A. A. Fomin was erected on the grounds of the Penza Regional Hospital. In 1976, to mark the 100th anniversary of Burdenko's birth, the wooden house of his parents, where the scientist spent his childhood and youth (1886-1897), was moved from the former Chembarskaya Street (renamed Burdenko Street in 1947) to the hospital grounds, where it remains to this day.
And here's another monument next to the N. N. Burdenko House Museum. It's dedicated to some zemstvo doctor who worked at the same clinic and was buried on its grounds. But I never found out who it was...
P.S. The author and the site administration express their gratitude to the head of the N. N. Burdenko Museum and D. V. Suchkova.
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