REMEMBERING THE TEACHERS

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the memory of two outstanding Russian hygienists with complex destinies and features of characters, who had crossed life paths and were accompanied by radical scientific contradictions. First of them is Professor Grigory V. Khlopin (1863–1929), until 1917 — full state councilor, holder of the Order of St. Stanislav and two orders of St. Vladimir, in Soviet times — Honored Scientist of Russia, founder and head of several departments of higher learning in the country, author of many manuals, textbooks and monographs. Khlopin was the first in our country to develop a training program for sanitary doctors and introduced it at his educational department already in 1912. During the First World War, on behalf of the Artillery Directorate of the General Staff, he organized an Anti-Gas Laboratory at the department, which developed effective means of protection in case of chemical warfare. G.V. Khlopin completed his career at the Military Medical Academy, where he headed the department of hygiene. Another outstanding hygienist to whom this article is also dedicated is Professor Zakhary G. Frenkel (1869–1970), whose life also took place in two contrasting eras. Until 1917, he was a graduate of Dorpat University, an active figure in the area of zemstvo medicine — clinician, epidemiologist, demographer, deputy of the 1st State Duma, member of the Central Committee of the Constitutional Democrats Party. In Soviet times, Frenkel was the organizer of the Hygiene Department at the City Museum, the founder and head of two departments at the Institute for Advanced Medical Studies, Social and Communal Hygiene, an academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, and a long-term leader of the Leningrad Society of Hygienists and Sanitary Doctors. Z.G. Frenkel considered the main work of his hundred-year life to be the monograph “Life extension and Active Aging”, which is considered the “bible” of social gerontology. The article contains little-known facts from the biographies of these two outstanding scientists, presents the nature of their scientific disagreements, arising, among other things, from complicated characters, which adds non-standard colors to their portraits.