Vigdorchik

VIGDORCHIK, Nikolai (Nathan) Abramovich (born 1874), a known specialist in the field of social insurance and occupational hygiene. In 1898 he graduated from the medical faculty of Kiev University. As a student, he actively participated in the social democratic movement in Kiev, working in the groups 'Rabocheye Delo' (Workers' Cause), 'Kievsky Soyuz Bor'by za Osvobozhdeniye Rabochego Klassa' (Kiev Union for the Liberation of the Working Class) and 'Rabochaya Gazeta' (Workers' Newspaper). He participated in the I Congress of the RSDRP in Minsk. A significant part of the illegal articles, brochures and proclamations published during this period in Kiev belongs to the pen of V. The same period also dates V.'s first scientific work on issues of social insurance - 'On the insurance of workers against accidents.' In 1899 V. was arrested on charges of participating in the social democratic party. From 1902 to 1905 he spent in exile in Yenisei Province, where he served as a rural doctor. In 1905 and 1906 he spent abroad in Berlin and Vienna, studying internal diseases and issues of social insurance. From 1906 he settled in St. Petersburg, where he took an active part in developing issues of social insurance for workers. From 1918 he worked in Soviet insurance organizations in Leningrad and Irkutsk. In 1923 he was elected as associate professor in the department of social hygiene at Irkutsk University. In 1924 he was elected professor in the department of occupational diseases at the State Institute for the Advancement of Physicians in Leningrad. In the same year he organized the Leningrad Institute for the Study of Occupational Diseases and is still its director. He developed a new methodology for determining disability.

V. published more than 200 printed works. The most significant: 'Social Insurance', St. Petersburg, 1912; 'Child mortality among St. Petersburg workers', St. Petersburg, 1913; 'Theory and practice of social insurance', issues 1-8, Moscow-Petrograd, 1919-24; 'Disability', a statistical study, Moscow-Leningrad, 1924; 'Essays on occupational hygiene', Moscow-Leningrad, 1925; 'Methodology of medical-insurance examination', Moscow, 1926.