YURI NIKOLAEVICH DARKSHEVICH — TALENTED RUSSIAN SCIENTIST-PATHOLOGIST

Abstract

The article is devoted to the life and professional activities of a talented Russian scientist-pathologist and educator, a representative of the Leningrad School of Pathologists, Candidate of Medical Sciences Yuri Nikolaevich Darkshevich (06.10.1915–17.10.1990), who was born into the family of a non-party, zemstvo doctor, from the nobility with Polish roots and from the family of hereditary doctors Nikolai Nikolaevich Darkshevich and teacher Evstolia Fyodorovna Budantseva. In 1938, his father was repressed and executed on false charges. Despite this, at the age of 16, Yuri entered the 1st Leningrad Medical Institute and successfully graduated in 1938. In 1939, after one year of working as a doctor in Vologda, he entered full-time postgraduate study at the Pathology Department of the Institute of the same name, after completing which he remained at the department as an assistant, and in 1950 defended his candidate’s dissertation on the topic of “Inflammatory growths of the liver epithelium”. During the Great Patriotic War, Yu.N. Darkshevich was called up for military service, which took place in the pathology laboratory of the Leningrad Front and in the military medical museum with the military rank of captain of the medical service. In 1953, he was forced to leave the department as the “son of an enemy of the people” and until the end of his life worked at the S.P. Botkin Clinical Infectious Diseases Hospital as the head of the Pathology Department, where his talent as a remarkable scientist, practical pathologist and outstanding infectious disease morphologist was most fully manifested. His scientific interests were mainly the morphology of viral hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver. While working in the hospital’s dissection department, he collected more than 5,000 observations of this pathology. A meticulous study of histotopograms allowed him to identify the nature and variants of the spread of the inflammatory process in the liver and to make original corresponding conclusions, which he summarized in his almost completed doctoral dissertation on the topic of “Viral hepatitis — morphological changes in the liver”. But most of his own work remained unpublished, and the dissertation itself remained unprotected. The reason for the last two facts is most likely the communist regime that reigned in our country. Yu.N. Darkshevich died in Leningrad at the age of 75. He was buried in the “Stepnoy Complex” cemetery in Orenburg.