THE TRAGIC FATE AND IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE FORMATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN ANATOMY OF SPBSPMU PROFESSOR N.V. POPOVA-LATKINA
Abstract
The article is dedicated to Natalia V. Popova-Latkina, one of the first lecturers of Leningrad Paediatric Medical Institute (LPMI), which became Saint Petersburg State Paediatric Medical University (SPbSMU) on 27.04.2012. June 12, 2021 will be 125 years since the birth of this remarkable woman, and in 2023 it will be 45 years since the day she passed away. The fate of Natalia was very interesting and deeply tragic at the same time. First of all, Professor N.V. Popova-Latkina has gone down in history as the founder of the Astrakhan scientific school of anatomists and embryologists. But only the last 35 years of her life were connected with Astrakhan, and for the first 46 years and a half she lived in the city on the Neva. In Leningrad, she found love, raised her son, met a great teacher, who became her supervisor - Sergei Ivanovich Lebedkin. In Leningrad Natalia came to love anatomy, began to teach it, and was an exemplary assistant to the chairs of normal anatomy and the Third Leningrad Medical Institute, and LPMI. In the meantime she also managed to work at the Natural Science Institute named after P.F. Lesgaft. She was invited there by her favourite teacher - professor S. I. Lebedkin. In Leningrad Natalia wrote doctoral thesis and defended it in 1942 war year, in blockade. Somewhere near Leningrad her husband and son, who had gone to militia and died in the battles for their native city, were left lying. Natalia herself in the last degree of exhaustion was taken from Leningrad to Barnaul, where at that time the Astrakhan State Medical Institute (ASMI) was in evacuation, which became her last place of work. That was the end of the Leningrad period of N.V. Popova-Latkina’s life, to which this article is mainly devoted. Its purpose was to clarify the contribution of N.V. Popova-Latkina to the formation of the Anatomy Department of the St. Petersburg state medical university, to trace the main stages of her tragic biography, to identify professional and personal qualities that helped her to withstand all blows of fate and become an outstanding anatomist.
