Grigorii Nikolaevich Minkh

Born Sept. 7 (19), 1836, in the village of Griazi, present-day Lipetsk Oblast; died Dec. 11 (23), 1896, in Kiev. Russian specialist in infectious diseases, epidemiologist, and pathoanatomist.

In 1861, Minkh graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University. From 1876 to 1895 he was a professor of pathological anatomy at Kiev University. Minkh was the author of classic works on leprosy and plague. He asserted that leprosy was a contagious disease, and he described the clinical aspects of plague and determined the length of its incubation period and the means of its transmission. In 1874, two years before a similar experiment made by his pupil O. O. Mochutkovskii, Minkh conducted a heroic experiment: he inoculated himself with the blood of a patient with relapsing fever and became ill, proving the contagiousness of the disease. He was the first to state and give evidence for the hypothesis that lice are carriers of relapsing fever and typhus. Minkh established the common origin of the intestinal and pulmonary forms of anthrax.