Bekarkhov

Bekarkhov, Dmitrii Dmitrievich (born in 1861), physician and public health advocate, literary, scientific and practical worker in the field of children's health protection. Graduated from Kazan University in 1886. Worked as a district physician in zemstvo, city and on the railway; from 1901 he moved to the position of school sanitary physician in Moscow, where he soon took a leading position as chairman of the Commission of School Physicians. B. was an active member of the Pirogov Commission for the dissemination of hygienic knowledge among the people. After the revolution, B. headed the department for children's health protection of the Moscow Health Department and is an active member of the State Institute of Social Hygiene, participating in the development of issues of school improvement and sanitary education in school. B. is the author of an original guide to school hygiene, one of the first in the Russian language («School Hygiene», M., 1911), editor of the collective guide «Protection of Children's Health in School» (M., 1927), an active contributor to pedagogical and medical periodicals, who in all his works maintained the consistent viewpoint that «the voice of hygiene should be heard and taken into account in all issues concerning education and upbringing», and that «the guarantee of healthy upbringing lies in the widest involvement of the teaching staff in active self-activity in regard to the transformation of the school on bio-social principles». In political views, B. before the revolution was close to the radical intelligentsia, was persecuted for underground work among workers (administrative exile to Akmolinsk in 1889-91); after the October Revolution, he unhesitatingly and without reservation took part in the new constructive work.