Osip Osipovich Mochutkovskii

Born 1845 in Kherson Province; died May 23 (June 5), 1903, in St. Petersburg. Russian physician.

In 1869, Mochutkovskii graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Kiev. From 1893 he occupied the chair of neuropathology at the St. Petersburg Clinical Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians, where he was also a professor of neuropathology. In 1876 he conducted an experiment in which he inoculated himself with the blood of a typhus patient and later with the blood of a patient with relapsing fever; he contracted both diseases, thus proving (as did G. N. Minkh in 1874) that the disease-producing pathogen is found in the blood of the patient. Long before C. Nicolle, Mochutkovskii demonstrated that these diseases could be transmitted by lice bites. He also established the incubation period of typhus.

Mochutkovskii was the author of numerous works on balneology (about the Odessa limans), neuropathology, and tuberculosis. In 1867 he founded the Balneological Society in Odessa and the Odessa Physicians’ Mutual Aid Society. Mochutkovskii also founded the luzhnorusskaia meditsinskaia gazeta (Southern Russian Medical Gazette; 1892–96).