Mochutnovskii

Mochutnovskii Osip Osipovich (1845-1903), an outstanding scientist of the second half of the 19th century. He received his medical degree in 1869 in Kyiv. In 1877, he defended his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Medicine (Materials for the Pathology and Therapy of Relapsing Fever, Odessa, 1877). Until 1877, he headed the infectious diseases department of the Odessa City Hospital, and after that, the department for nervous diseases. From 1893, he worked in St. Petersburg at the Institute for Advanced Medical Training as a consultant and professor of nervous diseases. - While working at the Odessa City Hospital, M. conducted experiments on himself that established the contagiousness of the blood of patients with typhus and relapsing fever. He inoculated himself with blood from a typhus patient, after which he developed severe typhus. He performed a similar experiment with blood from a relapsing fever patient, also with a positive result. M.'s illnesses were very severe and apparently left consequences that caused his premature death. Thus, along with G. Minkh, M. has priority in establishing the extremely important epidemiological fact in the study of parasitic typhuses (the presence of infection in the blood and the possible role of blood-sucking vectors).--M. was a prominent public figure. In Odessa, he founded the balneological society and the Odessa branch of the society of mutual aid for physicians. He was the founder of the organ of the Odessa physicians' society (South Russian Medical Gazette, Odessa, 1892-1896). - The most outstanding works of M.: 'Acute Ascending Paralysis' (Proceedings of the Odessa Balneological Society, Vol. 1, Odessa, 1875); 'Experimental Research on the Inoculability of Typhus and Other Infectious Diseases' (Moscow Medical Herald, 1876, No. 4); 'Materialien zur Pathologie u. Therapie des Rückfalltyphus' (Deutsches Archiv für klinische Medizin, Vol. XXIV, 1879); 'Observations on Relapsing Fever' (Vrach, 1880, Nos. 19 and 40, 1881, No. 25); 'On the Inoculability of Typhus' (Russian Archive of Pathology, Vol. V, p. 73, 1900). In addition, M. authored numerous works on balneology (on the Odessa lagoons), on nervous diseases, and on tuberculosis.