Daniil Kirillovich Zabolotnyi

Born Dec. 12 (28), 1866, in the village of Chebotarka, now Zabolotnoe, in Krizhopil’skii Raion, Vinnitsa Oblast; died Dec. 15, 1929, in Kiev. Soviet microbiologist and epidemiologist, one of the pioneers in epidemiology in the USSR. Academician (1922) and president (1928-29) of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929).

Zabolotnyi was arrested in 1889 for taking part in student disorders and was expelled from the natural history division of the physics and mathematics department of Novorossiia University (Odessa), from which he graduated in 1891 after passing his examinations without attending lectures. He graduated from the medical department of the University of Kiev in 1894.

In 1893, Zabolotnyi demonstrated on himself (and I. G. Savchenko) that oral cholera vaccine prevents cholera. He also went on expeditions to study plague in India, Arabia, and Mongolia and helped organize the first plague-control laboratories. Zabolotnyi proved experimentally that bubonic and pneumonic plague have identical origins and that anti-plague serum is therapeutic. He advanced the theory that plague is a natural focal disease (1922).

In 1898, Zabolotnyi organized Russia’s first department of bacteriology (which he directed until 1928) at the St. Petersburg Women’s Medical Institute and the world’s first department of epidemiology in Odessa in 1920. In 1921 he founded and became the first rector of the Odessa Medical Institute and in 1928, in Kiev, he organized the Ukrainian Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which is now named after him. He was one of the founders of the International Society of Micro-biologists.

Zabolotnyi directed the Medical-Epidemiological Commission of the Main Military Medical Directorate of the Red Army. He was a member of the Scientific Medical Council of the People’s Commissariat for Health and organized courses for military and civilian medical epidemiologists. He was a deputy to the St. Petersburg and Kiev Soviets and member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. Zabolotnyi wrote numerous scientific studies on plague, cholera, malaria, syphilis, diphtheria, typhus fever, and other diseases.