Bogoslovsky, Sergey Mikhailovich

BOGOSLOVSKY, Sergey Mikhailovich, a well-known sanitary physician and statistician (born in 1870). After graduating from the medical faculty of Moscow University (1894) and a short period of practical medical work, he specialized as a sanitary physician (1900). Even in the very first phases of his medical career, he proved himself an active, thorough, and subtle researcher of the social environment as a factor in population morbidity. This direction essentially predetermined the character of the work to which Bogoslovsky devoted himself subsequently: it found particularly favorable ground when Bogoslovsky was invited to join the Moscow Gubernia Sanitary Bureau (1908), where he took on the management of morbidity statistics and, in particular, the development of the complex issue of the methodology of occupational morbidity. This task was successfully resolved in the form of a system of statistical research on occupational morbidity developed by Bogoslovsky, which was based on his rationalistic principle of studying the conditions of a "detailed profession." Subsequently, the "Bogoslovsky system" formed the basis for the development of this research in the country.

The new conditions of state life, which created new tasks for sanitary statistics, attracted Bogoslovsky's attention. He developed the statistical part of the "dispensary system for the population" (for the Moscow Health Department). His management of the Department of Public Health in the Central Statistical Administration focused Bogoslovsky's attention on the tasks of state sanitary statistics; this was expressed in the revision of the "general system of sanitary-statistical research" and in the creation of a "plan for its organization in the USSR"; at the same time, Bogoslovsky was an active collaborator of the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR in the creative work of its statistical department on the development and practical implementation of rational sanitary statistics in the sanitary-preventive institutions of the state. The most important printed works of Bogoslovsky: "Morbidity of workers of the Bogorodsko-Glukhovskaya and Istomkinskaya factories, Bogorodsky Uyezd for 1896-1900," Moscow, 1906; "Zemstvo medical budget of Moscow Gubernia for 1883-1905," Moscow, 1908; "On methods of statistical research of occupational morbidity" (together with P. I. Kurkin), "Obshchestvenny Vrach" [Public Physician], 1911, No. 6; "System of professional classification," Moscow, 1911; "Statistics of occupational morbidity" (factory and plant workers of Moscow Gubernia), Moscow, 1923; "Statistics of occupational morbidity," parts 1 and 2, Moscow, 1926-27. He also authored the Russian translation of the major work by Professor K. B. Lehmann, "Handbook of General and Occupational Hygiene," Moscow-Leningrad, 1923.