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Google Remembers Vera Gedroits 151st Birthday : Google Honours Vera Gedroits 151st Birthday


Published on Oct 08, 2021

Google Remembers Vera Gedroits 151st Birthday : Google Honours Vera Gedroits 151st Birthday

 

Google Remembers Vera Gedroits 151st Birthday : Princess Vera Ignatievna Gedroits was a Russian doctor of medicine and author. She was the first female military surgeon in Russia. She was the first female military surgeon in Russia, the first female professor of surgery, and the first woman to serve as a physician in the Imperial Palace of Russia.

As a young physician, Gedroits was concerned at the low standards of hygiene, nutrition and sanitation, and made recommendations to improve conditions.




Google Remembers Vera Gedroits 151st Birthday :

Gedroits was the middle child among five living siblings, Maria (1861), Ignatius (1864), Nadezhda (1876), and Alexandra. Another brother, Sergei, of whom she was particularly fond, died young and would later inspire her literary pseudonym. Following Sergei's death, she developed an interest in medicine, vowing to become a doctor so that she could help to prevent suffering. The children, like their mother, were raised as Orthodox, but their father remained Catholic.

Vera Gedroits

Vera Gedroits knew she was in a race against time. She had to escape. Overnight, gunfire from the battlefront had grown ever nearer and only now, at 02:00, was it beginning to die down. As the train’s wheels creaked and the vehicle lumbered tentatively into motion, it cut a shadowy silhouette across the nocturnal landscape. All lights had been put out to try and prevent the train from being spotted by enemy gunners.

As a mobile hospital, it shouldn’t have been a major target in any case. But now that it was in motion, shells nevertheless began to rain down in its direction.

Gedroits looked around at some of the patients on board. In all, there were about 900, many of them lying in terrible pain on stretchers fixed to the walls. There were some horrific battlefield injuries among them. Infections. Open wounds. Gedroits didn’t have a moment to lose. During the next few hours, she and her team performed operations and provided whatever treatment they could as the train rumbled away from the front. About 12 hours later, it finally reached a safe distance.

Two weeks later, on 10 March 1905, the battle ended with the Russian army defeated. Before long, the war itself was lost.

This was a turning point for Vera Ignatievna Gedroits – a descendant of Lithuanian royalty, a gifted surgeon, an odd-ball, a polymath. Princess Gedroits, as she may rightfully be called, was an extraordinary figure – and yet today she is largely unknown in the West. As a pioneer of battlefield medicine, Gedroits made contributions that some think could have saved thousands of lives during WWI had they been better understood at the time.

War, Revolution, and University life

Despite all the other claims on her time Vera had continued the work on hernias that she had learnt from Roux in Switzerland. Like much of her efforts this went unrecorded and unheeded, but can still be found in the archives in Kiev.'3 She amplified this work into a thesis for the doctorate of medicine, University of Moscow, which she achieved in 1912.'4 Before this she had written up her experiences as an industrial doctor when working at the Maltsev factories.'5 She had thus laid the foundations at an early stage for an academic career. This was reinforced by the book she published at the outset of the first world war, Surgical Discussions for Nurses and Doctors.'6 There is a telling sentence emphasising the lesson she had learnt in the RussoJapanese war and which it took many months of bitter fighting and coundess casualties on the western front to teach: "Abdominal injuries always necessitate surgical intervention and emintion."

Vera's experience in the Russo-Japanese war prepared her well for the first world war, and during the years 1917-8 she was a surgeon to the 6th Simbirsk Rifle Division (Simbirsk is a region of Siberia). After being wounded she was evacuated to Kiev. She survived the troubled times after the war and revolution and established herself as an academic surgeon. In 1924 she published a workon the biological foundations of nutrition'8 and also worked on more traditional surgical topics such as the surgical treatment of tuberculosis of the knee. In 1929 she was appointed professor ofsurgery at the University of Kiev. This was quite an achievement for a princess. She had started to write her memoirs, which were very fictionalised but related to fact.

They make up a cycle under the general title Life published in 1930 and 1931 but dealing only with'her life up to 1904. She died in Kiev in 1932 at the age of 56. Who knows what she may have written about her later years, which surely must have been as full and exciting as any of the other professors of surgery about whom so much has been written. The help given to a British army officer by Irina Fochkina (Moscow), Elena Chernyavskaya (Kiev), and Tanya Yeroshkina (St Petersburg) is gratefully acknowledged.


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