Petr Borisovich Gannushkin

Born Feb. 24 (Mar. 8), 1875, in the village of Novoselki, Pronsk District, in present-day Riazan’ Oblast; died Feb. 23, 1933, in Moscow. Soviet psychiatrist.

Gannushkin graduated from the medical department of Moscow University in 1898. He was a student of S. S. Kor-sakov and V. P. Serbskii. From 1918 he was a professor at the subdepartment of psychiatry of Moscow University (from 1930 professor at the First Moscow Medical Institute). He was the founder of so-called minor psychiatry (which includes the study of states bordering between the psychological norm and pathology) and established clinical criteria for the delimitation of psychopathies. He helped to organize a system of nonhospital psychiatric assistance in the USSR and worked out questions dealing with the teaching of psychiatry and the prevention of mental illness. He founded a major school of Soviet psychiatrists.