Nikolai Dmitrievich Strazhesko

STRAZHESKO, Nikolai Dmitrievich (born 1876), academician, an outstanding clinician and therapist. Upon graduating from the medical faculty of Kiev University in 1899, he worked under the guidance of V. P. Obraztsov, became his successor in the clinic of internal diseases, and created a clinical school with a pathophysiological orientation. Strazhesko deepened his medical education under the greatest clinicians of the West (Potain, Leyden, Müller) and theorists of the Union (Academician I. P. Pavlov, Laudenbach, Vysokovich). In 1904, Strazhesko defended his dissertation on the physiology of the intestines, completed in the laboratory of I. P. Pavlov, and received the title of Doctor of Medicine. He served as a private docent, in 1910 as a professor in the department of private pathology and therapy at the Kiev Women's Medical Institute, and in 1917 as a professor of medical diagnostics and head of the therapeutic department of the former Alexander Hospital; in 1919 he was elected director of the therapeutic faculty clinic of Novorossiysk University, and in 1922 of the propaedeutic clinic of the Kiev Medical Institute; from 1927 he headed the hospital therapeutic clinic, and from 1929 simultaneously the faculty therapeutic clinic of the same institute. Since 1931, he has headed the clinical department of the Institute of Experimental Biology and Pathology in Kiev. In 1934, he was elected an academician of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the department of clinical medicine. Throughout his entire career, Strazhesko has conducted extensive teaching, scientific, organizational, and public work. Strazhesko is the deputy chairman of the All-Ukrainian and All-Union Society of Therapists, a member of the Scientific Medical Council of the People's Commissariat of Health of Ukraine, an active participant and leader of scientific medical organizations in Kiev, and a member of the Rheumatism Committee.

He was elected to the committee and many other organizations, and is an editor of a number of medical journals of the Union. Under his editorship and with his direct participation, a number of manuals on the clinic of gastrointestinal diseases have been published (with V. P. Obraztsov, in a manual edited by Lang and Pletnev, in a course on private pathology in the Ukrainian language), as well as the monograph "Fundamentals of Physical Diagnosis of Abdominal Cavity Diseases" (Kiev, 1924). Strazhesko has published more than 60 scientific works. His experimental works on the physiology of digestion and the cardiovascular system retain outstanding significance to this day: "On the Physiology of the Intestines" (dissertation, St. Petersburg, 1904); "Strophanthin as a Cardiac Agent" (Kiev, 1910); on fluctuations in arterial blood pressure of cardiac origin; on the influence of cardiac agents on the peripheral endings of the vagus nerve. In his clinical works, Strazhesko described a number of clinical syndromes that have become classic. Together with V. P. Obraztsov, and later independently, he developed the clinical picture of coronary artery occlusion of the heart (1910); he developed topics on: the splitting of heart sounds, venous pulse and heart failure in neuroses, the splitting of the 2nd sound in aortic insufficiency, on coecum mobile, on the melody of the heart in Adams-Stokes syndrome, on the syndrome of occlusion of the right branch of the portal vein, and others.

The latest period of Strazhesko's scientific work is characterized by a synthetic approach to the study of major clinical problems based on the clinical-experimental study of the dynamics of pathological processes. The main works of this stage are devoted to angina pectoris and cardiac asthma (1926), problems of sepsis and rheumatism, and endocarditis. In the latter, Strazhesko substantiated the theory of the unity of sepsis, endocarditis, and rheumatism.