Sergei Petrovich Fedorov

Born Jan. 11 (23), 1869, in Moscow; died Jan. 15, 1936, in Leningrad. Soviet surgeon. Honored Scientist of the RSFSR (1928).

In 1891, Fedorov graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University, where he was a student of A. A. Bobrov. From 1903 to 1936 he was a professor and head of the subdepartment of hospital surgery at the Military Medical Academy; during the same period, from 1926 to 1933, he also served as director of the Leningrad Institute of Surgical Neuropathology, the first such institute in the USSR.

Fedorov developed a combined clinical-physiological approach. His major studies dealt with the surgery of the urinary system and the bile ducts. The founder of the Russian school of urology, Fedorov proposed new methods of diagnosis and developed new surgical instruments and techniques for operations on the kidneys and the urinary tract; for example, he performed (1899) the first single-stage suprapubic prostatectomy. He also established urology as a separate medical specialty.

Fedorov was the founder and president of the Russian Urological Society (1907) and president of the International Congress of Urologists in Berlin (1914).

Fedorov was also concerned with neurosurgery and abdominal surgery. He developed new techniques and modified old ones for operating on the brain, the autonomic and peripheral nervous systems, the intestines, and the bile ducts. For example, he developed the Fedorov incision for gallbladder surgery and designed a special instrumentarium for trephination of the skull, clamps to stop hemorrhage in the dura mater, a proctoscope, and a set of instruments for surgery on the bile ducts. Fedorov was the first in Russia (1893–94) to prepare a tetanus antitoxin. He was also concerned with the surgical treatment of diseases of the esophagus and the lungs, with traumatology and military field surgery, and with oncology, anesthesiology, and blood transfusion.

Fedorov was one of the founders (1921) and editors of Novyi khirurgicheskii arkhiv, the first Soviet surgical journal. He was the first Soviet surgeon to be awarded the Order of Lenin (1933). He founded a school of surgery, the leading representatives of which included N. N. Elanskii, I. S. Kolesnikov, P. A. Kupriia-nov, and V. N. Shamov.