Ostroumov

OSTROUMOV Alexey Alexeyevich (1844-1908), famous Russian therapist, professor, born in Moscow. After graduating from Moscow University, he worked in the clinic of Zakharyin. After defending his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Medicine («On the origin of the first heart sound», Moscow, 1873), in 1873 he was sent abroad, where in the laboratory of Heidenhain he worked on issues of vascular innervation and innervation of sweat glands. From Germany, O. returned fully equipped with the medical science of the time. In 1879, O. was appointed privat-docent, and in 1880 professor of the hospital therapeutic clinic of Moscow University, a position he held until 1903. Works in the field of physiology under the guidance of Babukhin in Russia and Heidenhain in Germany, in parallel with the clinic, left their mark on all of O.'s subsequent activities. He developed not only into an excellent clinical diagnostician and pathoanatomist, as many of his contemporaries abroad and in Russia were, but was also a physiologist-clinician. O.'s works in the field of physiology were not just excursions into the latter, they are still cited in physiology guides in all languages. O. was the first in 1876 to show the possibility of obtaining primary vasodilation without prior vasoconstriction, which was later confirmed by Baudisch, Warén and others. O. also proved that vasodilators innervating the hind limbs originate in the abdominal part of the sympathetic nervous system. O.'s general pathological views are set forth in his clinical lectures, where he formulates his understanding of the basic problems of medicine. Attaching great importance to experiments on animals, O. at the same time ridiculed clinicians who evaluated everything exclusively from the point of view of «frog and dog» physiology. A great merit of O. is that he was able to rise above the «Virchow organopathology» that prevailed in his era with its localistic understanding of pathological processes. «The organism is a whole, the disorder of one part is reflected in the entire organism by a change in the vital activity of its other parts, therefore the weakening of the function of one organ disrupts the entire organism». At the same time, O. actively fought against the commonly accepted view during the heyday of bacteriology that the causes of diseases lie exclusively outside the organism, and constantly defended and emphasized the importance of the macroorganism, resp. the constitution of man, which has a tremendous significance for the occurrence of disease. At the same time, he constantly emphasizes the enormous role of the external environment in which the organism develops, lives and gets sick, and considers disease as a violation of the balance between the organism and the environment. Hence his emphasis on the need to individualize the patient. O. seeks to connect his clinical conclusions with the data of general biology. He persistently and repeatedly conveys the idea that medicine is part of the natural sciences and its further development is possible only if it is linked with other natural science disciplines. Despite these individual, generally valuable for that time and new thoughts, O. remains basically a clinician whose circle of thought does not go beyond the individual patient and who does not know how to see the main basis of morbidity and mortality of the masses in the feudal-capitalist conditions of tsarist Russia. His evolutionary views represent a motley mixture of Lamarckism with Darwinism, which leads him to reactionary conclusions regarding the change in living conditions. «Strong hereditary organs from non-exercise in a new environment weaken and are transmitted to children in this form. Therefore, despite the apparent improvement in external living conditions, housing, nutrition, etc., we are often witnesses to the degeneration and extinction of the offspring of people who have sharply changed the living environment». On the other hand, recognizing natural selection, he (like almost all bourgeois scientists) extends it to human society, thus being a supporter of reactionary social Darwinism. O. published over 60 scientific works scattered in periodicals. The most important of them are devoted to the tympanic sound of the lungs (1874), innervation of sweat glands (1876), the origin of edema under the influence of nerves (1879), the treatment of gastric catarrh (1882), acute kidney disease with simultaneous enlargement of the heart and thickening of arterial walls (1884). «Clinical Lectures» were published separately (Moscow, 1895). In 1903-04, the «Archive of O.'s Clinic» was published, prepared for printing by N. A. Kabanov (v. 1-2, Moscow). Many of O.'s students held and hold chairs in medical institutions of the USSR (Burmin, Gauthier, Vorobyov, Kabanov, Langovoy, Shchurovsky, Melkikh and others.). One of the largest hospitals in Moscow is named after O.