Contribution of academician N.N. Blokhin to the development of national reconstructive surgery

Abstract

Nikolai Nikolaevich Blokhin is an outstanding public figure, a scientist of world renown; known to contemporaries as the President of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, Academician of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, the creator of the largest oncological research center in the world, bearing his name, an excellent oncologist. But few people know Nikolai Nikolaevich as a talented plastic surgeon, traumatologist, and orthopedist! We emphasize that at the moment his activities in the development of reconstructive surgery are practically not covered. The purpose of the study was to analyze N.N. Blokhin’s contribution to restorative and plastic surgery over the war and post-war years, while working in the so-called “Gorky period”, 1941–1952. It was established that a number of technologies used by him were “pioneer”, which had not been unused in domestic reconstructive surgery before him. The various methods used by scientists to help the wounded in wartime and peacetime are given: with multiple combined injuries, extensive focal lesions of Red Army soldiers disfigured by explosions, burns of tankers, crippled pilots. During the Great Patriotic War, N.N. Blokhin having performed several hundred surgical procedures for skin grafting with a thick flap, changed the existing one before a negative attitude towards this type of surgery. The invention in 1946, together with M.V. Kolokoltsev, of the first domestic dermatome with a disc knife confirms N.N. Blokhin’s constant desire to create innovations in medicine. The initiative of the doctor has been proven, who, despite the current instructions, took responsibility and carried out complex reconstructive operations without sending the wounded during the Great Patriotic War to the deep rear. Often repeated with dignity by Nikolai Nikolaevich: “First of all, I am a doctor!” reveals the full depth of his worldview as a doctor who fulfilled his duty, based on creative potential, determining practical achievements in reconstructive surgery for the benefit of victims in peacetime and wartime.