Zakhar Frenkel

FRENKEL, Zakhar Grigoryevich (born in 1869), one of the most prominent figures in the field of social hygiene. He studied at the Nizhyn Gymnasium, where as early as the 4th grade he was an organizer of a clandestine revolutionary circle influenced by the ideas of Pisarev and Chernyshevsky. For his participation in the student movement as a member of the "Union Council of Fellow Countrymen," he was imprisoned in Butyrka prison and then exiled under police supervision. After graduating from the University of Dorpat, Frenkel worked as a resident at the Obukhov Hospital in St. Petersburg; from 1896, he served as a sanitary physician in the Novoladozhsky District, the Peterhof section, and the factory suburbs of the Moscow and Narva tracts. During this period, Frenkel published sketches on the labor conditions of workers in the flagstone quarries on the Volkhov River, in logging, timber and firewood rafting, and other works. In 1902–1905, Frenkel worked in the sanitary bureaus in Vologda and Kostroma. For his political activities, Frenkel was subjected to administrative persecution under Tsarism: exile from St. Petersburg in 1900, from Novgorod in 1901, and from Kostroma in 1909. Frenkel was a member of the First State Duma and served a prison sentence for signing the Vyborg Manifesto. In 1910 and 1913, Frenkel participated in the preparation and organization of the public medicine department at the International (in Dresden) and All-Russian hygiene exhibitions. From 1910–11, Frenkel lectured on "public medicine" at the former Yelena Institute and the Institute of Experimental Medicine; in 1912–13, he was elected head of the department of public sanitation at the Psychoneurological Institute; from 1919, he was head of the department of social hygiene at the State Institute of Medical Sciences (2nd Leningrad Medical Institute); and from 1920, head of the department of hygiene and sanitary affairs at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. Currently, Frenkel is a professor of social hygiene at the 2nd Leningrad Medical Institute and the State Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians, head of the hygiene sector of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM), and a consultant for several central, Leningrad, and other organizations. After the revolution, Frenkel created and for many years headed the department of communal hygiene at the Museum of the City in Leningrad.

Frenkel's published works (over 150) cover problems of healthcare organization, occupational health, demography and sanitary statistics, the improvement of populated areas, and partially relate to the epidemiology of intestinal infections.