Krasnogorskii, Nikolai Ivanovich

Born June 26 (July 8), 1882, in St. Petersburg; died Aug. 2, 1961, in Leningrad. Soviet physiologist and pediatrician. Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1945). Honored Scientist of the RSFSR (1944).

Krasnogorskii graduated from the Military Medical Academy in 1908. He was a pupil and collaborator of I. P. Pavlov. In his doctoral dissertation (1911) Krasnogorskii established the principles of internal inhibition and the localization of cutaneous and muscular sensibility in the cerebral cortex in dogs. His principal works dealt with the higher nervous activity; he was the first to use the method of conditioned reflexes to study the functions of the brain in healthy and sick children. He investigated the interaction of signaling systems in children, inhibitory conditioned reflexes, conditioned reflex connections that exist “for a while,” and the complex activity of the cerebral cortex. Krasnogorskii received the State Prize of the USSR in 1952 and the Pavlov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1942. He was also awarded the Order of Lenin and medals.