MUNBLIT

MUNBLIT Efim Grigorievich (born in 1867), physician and public health activist; graduated in 1897 from the medical faculty of Moscow University. During his student years, M. joined the 'Emancipation of Labor' group; for participation in revolutionary work, he was exiled for 2 years under police supervision to Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk), where he formed the first Marxist circle. The first years of his medical practice, M. spent in the Tver zemstvo. Then he temporarily left zemstvo work and until 1904 worked in the Obukhovskaya hospital and the Nadezhda Institute in St. Petersburg. He participated in the Russo-Japanese War. After the end of the war, M. returned to Leningrad, and at the beginning of 1906 he was elected secretary of the Moscow district sanitary council and delegate to provincial medical congresses; he served as co-editor of the journal 'Public Health Physician' and participated in the Pirogov congresses. During the imperialist war, M. was mobilized for a second time, and in 1916-17 worked in the Medical Bureau of the Zemstvo Union of the Western Front. From 1919 to 1930, M. headed the tuberculosis section of the People's Commissariat of Health, and from 1930 he was a consultant at the Tuberculosis Institute of the People's Commissariat of Health. M. is one of the creators of the powerful network of Soviet tuberculosis institutions. M.'s participation in the work of the People's Commissariat of Health is characterized by the development of tuberculosis dispensaries and auxiliary institutions attached to them, specialized sanatoriums for adults and children with pulmonary and bone tuberculosis, the broad involvement of the working public in the work of tuberculosis organizations, and the training of specialized physicians. To M. belongs a number of articles on the organization and methodology of the fight against tuberculosis; in 1923 he founded the journal 'Questions of Tuberculosis'. Under the editorship of Munblit, the collection of articles 'Tuberculosis and the Fight Against It' was published (Moscow, 1926). M. was deputy chairman of the organizational bureau of the 4 All-Union Congresses on the Fight Against Tuberculosis.