Grigorii Rossolimo

Born Dec. 5 (17), 1860, in Odessa; died Sept. 29, 1928, in Moscow. Soviet neuropathologist and psychoneurologist.

In 1884, Rossolimo graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University, where he was a student of A. Ia. Kozhevnikov. He was a fellow student and close friend of A. P. Chekhov. In 1890 he became head of the clinic of nervous diseases at A. A. Ostroumov’s clinic of internal diseases. In 1911 he resigned in protest against the reactionary activity of L. A. Kasso, the tsar’s minister of education. With his own funds he founded Russia’s first clinic of pediatric nervous diseases and maintained it from 1911 to 1917. In 1917 he became a professor in the subdepartment of nervous diseases at the First Moscow State University and director of the A. Ia. Kozhevnikov Clinic and the Neurological Institute.

Rossolimo’s principal works dealt with the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, the diagnosis of brain tumors, and the clinical picture of diffuse sclerosis, poliomyelitis, and recurrent paralysis of the facial nerve in migraine. He described the pathological toe reflex (Rossolimo’s reflex). Rossolimo wrote a number of works on experimental psychology and invented many medical instruments and apparatus, including the dynamometer, clonograph, and brain topographer.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Rossolimo worked on commissions of the People’s Commissariat for Public Health, the People’s Commissariat for Education, and the Main Military Sanitary Administration of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. He helped organize the Moscow Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists in 1890 and in 1901 became co-editor of the Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii im. S. S. Korsa-kova (S. S. Korsakov Journal of Neuropathology and Psychiatry).