Chagovets

Chagovets Vasily Yuryevich (born in 1873). Completed his course at the Military Medical Academy in 1897. From 1909, professor of pharmacology at Tomsk, then Kharkov universities. From 1910, professor of physiology at Kyiv University. Main works: "On the application of Arrhenius's dissociation theory to electrical phenomena in living tissues" (Journal of the Russian Physicochemical Society, 1896); "Outline of electrical phenomena in living tissues from the standpoint of the latest physicochemical theories," parts I and II, St. Petersburg, 1903-1906, and others. In these works, Ch. made the first attempt to apply the Nernst formula to calculate the strength of electrical currents of rest and action in muscles, nerves, and other tissues, and also developed the basic principles of the so-called condenser theory of irritation and the cable theory of nerve impulse transmission. In contrast to other ionic theories of excitation (Nernst, Lazarev, etc.), Ch. considers the main cause of excitation in living tissue not to be concentration changes caused by redistribution of different ions, but the emergence of electrical charges due to tissue polarization, with ions being held on semi-permeable membranes and giving them an electrical charge like the plates of a capacitor. From Ch.'s laboratory came a series of works by him and his students devoted to various questions of physiology and in particular the development of methods for photographic recording. Besides his scientific-theoretical activities, Ch. initiated the production in our Union of certain complex physiological instruments that had previously been obtained only from abroad (Einthoven's string galvanometer, Helmholtz's pendulum, etc.).