Vladimir Tonkov

TONKOV, Vladimir Nikolayevich (born 1872), a well-known anatomist, professor at the Military Medical Academy. Upon graduating from the Military Medical Academy in 1895, he was retained at the Department of Normal Anatomy in the Military Medical Academy under Professor Tarenetsky. In 1898, he was sent abroad, where he worked in the best anatomical institutes of Germany. In 1900, he was appointed professor of normal anatomy at the former Women's Medical Institute; in 1905, he was elected to the chair at Kazan University; in 1915, he took the chair of normal anatomy at the Military Medical Academy. He wrote a well-known textbook on normal anatomy that went through many editions and was adopted in medical higher education institutions. In it, for the first time in the USSR, the principle of an orto-phylogenetic illumination of anatomical material was systematically implemented. He has written about a hundred scientific papers on normal anatomy, histology, comparative anatomy, and embryology, published in Russian and German. His main works concern the embryology and anatomy of the vascular system, namely: the development of the spleen in various animals (1899–1922), vessels of the lymph nodes (1898), arteries of nerves and spinal ganglia (1898), veins of the pancreas (1903–20), and the development of anastomoses after ligation of various arteries (1895–1928). His dissertation on the vascularization of nerves and his "Manual of Human Normal Anatomy" (the latter edition: parts 1–2, Berlin–Moscow–Leningrad, 1923–28) are well known. He is a full and honorary member of various scientific societies in the Union and abroad. He is one of the initiators of the establishment of educational anatomical museums. He was the first in the Union to put into practice the idea of complex teaching of anatomy, i.e., he developed the theory and practice of the functional unification of the doctrine of form and structure, pursuing a dynamic direction in research and educational anatomy, substantiating morphological facts by their history of development and function. He was the first in the Union to make an experimental department (operating room, X-ray) an indispensable component of the department of anatomy. In 1915, he was elected to the position of scientific secretary of the Military Medical Academy.

From 1917 to 1925, he served as President (Head) of the Military Medical Academy. In Kazan in 1907, he organized the Society of People's Universities, served as its chairman, chairman of the medical section, and gave lectures to workers (formerly of the Alafuzov Plant). From the beginning of 1924, together with the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) collective of the Military Medical Academy, he organized lectures on natural science and medicine for workers of factories and plants in the Vyborg District of Leningrad; since November 1929 and to the present day, he has been conducting extensive educational work in the shops of the Leningrad Krasny Vyborzhets Plant. Together with M. Gorky, he took a direct part in organizing the Commission for Improving the Living Conditions of Scientists; he was the vice-chairman of this Commission. Twice (the 9th and 10th convocations) he was elected from the Military Medical Academy as a member of the Leningrad Soviet. In 1930, he was accepted as a candidate member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and since 1932 he has been a party member. Since 1934, he has been an Honored Scientist.