Petrovskii, Boris

Born June 14 (27), 1908, in Essentuki. Soviet surgeon and public figure, organizer of public health care. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1966) and the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1957). Hero of Socialist Labor (1968). Member of the CPSU since 1942.

Petrovskii graduated from the medical faculty of the First Moscow State University in 1930. From 1941 to 1944, during the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), he was chief surgeon of evacuation hospitals at the front. He was a professor of the subdepartment of general surgery at the Second Moscow Medical Institute in 1948 and 1949 and of the subdepartment of stationary surgery at the University of Budapest from 1949 to 1951; he was also head of the subdepartment of faculty surgery at the Second Moscow Medical Institute. Beginning in 1956 he was head of the subdepartment of stationary surgery at the First Moscow Medical Institute and, simultaneously, beginning in 1963, director of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Clinical and Experimental Surgery. In September 1965 he was appointed minister of public health of the USSR.

Petrovskii’s works deal with surgical methods of treating cancer of the esophagus and congenital and acquired defects of the heart. Petrovskii was the first in the USSR to successfully use artificial heart valves and developed and put into practice methods of kidney transplantation, bronchoplasty, and tracheoplasty. He created a school of surgeons.

Petrovskii was chairman of the All-Union Society of Surgeons in 1963, vice-president of the European Society of Cardiovascular Surgery in 1959, and an honorary member of many foreign academies and scientific societies. He received the Lenin Prize in 1960 for works on surgery of the heart and blood vessels and the State Prize of the USSR in 1971 for works on kidney transplantation. Petrovskii is editor in chief of the third edition of the Great Medical Encyclopedia. He was a delegate to the Twenty-second through Twenty-fourth Congresses of the CPSU; at the last two he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. A deputy to the sixth through eighth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, he has been awarded three Orders of Lenin, an Order of the October Revolution, two other orders, several foreign orders, and various medals.