Irinarch Skvortsov

SKVORTSOV, IRINARCH Polikhronievich (1847-1921), a well-known professor of hygiene. Born in Samara Governorate, upon graduating from the theological seminary he entered Kazan University, from which he graduated in 1871. He worked briefly in Zemstvo institutions and from 1872 was assigned to the same Kazan University to prepare for a professorial title in the departments of physiology and hygiene. He defended his doctoral dissertation at the Military Medical Academy; from 1875 he was invited as a privatdozent in hygiene at Kazan University, where he practically until 1882 conducted all the teaching; from 1882 to 1885 he was a professor at Warsaw University, and from 1885 to 1906 at Kharkov University in the Department of Hygiene. From 1906, after retiring, he worked in Kiev, where he held the position of professor of hygiene at Kiev University. Skvortsov is known as the author of numerous (up to 150) articles and works on various issues of hygiene and sanitary affairs, published in the periodical medical and general press. At the same time, Skvortsov was the author of several courses in hygiene, among which first place must be given to the "Fundamentals of Hygiology and Hygiene," where the author presents his original concept of understanding hygiene as a science, broadly connecting it with the fundamental physical, chemical, and biological processes of life in nature as a whole.

Skvortsov presents, both in this course and in a series of separate articles on the same topic, his so-called dynamic theory of the essence of life as a "holistic unity of man and environment." From this point of view, Skvortsov distinguishes hygiology as a particular biology of a living creature ("natural conditions of a healthy existence"). Hygiology is the science of health just as pathology is the science of disease. From the same point of view, hygiene studies life already under its artificial conditions, i.e., the so-called external environment, daily life, etc., and provides corresponding practical proposals for their improvement. In these views of Skvortsov, there is a healthy core of the need for the complex application of physiological and physico-chemical methods in hygiene, a broad understanding of the external environment, and the simultaneous study of both man himself and the external environment in their interaction. - Skvortsov's main works: "Fundamentals of Hygiology and Hygiene" (Moscow, 1900), "Military Field Hygiene" (St. Petersburg, 1904), "Hygiene, with the inclusion of anatomy, physiology and pathology" (popular exposition, St. Petersburg, 1906).