Zagorskii, Petr Andreevich

Born Aug. 9 (20), 1764, in the village of Pomornitsa, in what is now Korop Raion, Chernigov Oblast; died Mar. 20 (Apr. 1), 1846, in St. Petersburg. Russian anatomist and physiologist, founder of the first Russian school of anatomy, academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1807).

Zagorskii graduated from the St. Petersburg School of Medicine and Surgery in 1786. Beginning in 1799 he lectured on anatomy and physiology at the Academy of Medicine and Surgery and introduced compulsory classes to study cadavers. He devised a classification of deformities. In his work Fluids of the Human Body (1819), he criticized the vitalistic concepts of “vital force” and “essential force” in physiology.