Mark B. Mirsky: A Leading Russian Historian of Medicine and Surgery (1930–2010)

Mark Borisovich Mirsky was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine on 3 October 1930 in a Jewish family. His parents worked in the field which we would name today as biotechnology: his father headed a factory producing vaccines and sera while his mother worked on optimization of production of albumins, gamma-globulins, and other biological products for medical applications. After beginning of the Second World War, production was relocated to the Eastern parts of Russia, and the family accordingly moved to Irkutsk and then to Kuibyshev (now Samara). In 1948, Mark graduated from high school with excellent grades and moved to Moscow to study medicine.

In 1954, Mark Mirsky received the M.D. from the N.I. Pirogov Russian State Medical University (in that time—the I.V. Stalin Second State Moscow Medical Institute) and started to work at “Meditsinskiy Rabotnik” (now “Meditsinskaya Gazeta”) which was an official periodical of the Ministry of Health of USSR with a circulation that reached one million copies by the 1970s. In the beginning he shared his time between journalistic and medical activity working also in a surgical department during night shifts. Later on he concentrated on his work as a medical journalist and became a head of the Department of Science and a member of the Editorial Board of the newspaper. In 1964, he received the Ph.D. from the N.A. Semashko Research Institute for Social Hygiene and Healthcare (now the National Research Institute for Public Health). His dissertation focused on history of Russian medical publishing in 1917–20. In 1969, Mark Mirsky left the newspaper and moved to the Institute for Organ and Tissue Transplantology (now the V.I. Shumakov Federal Research Centre for Transplantology and Artificial Organs) as a head of a group. In 1981, he defended a habilitation thesis on a history of Russian transplant surgery; four years later it was published as a book. From 1985 till his death he worked at the above mentioned the Semashko Institute. There he was a head of the Department for the History of Medicine and Healthcare from 1989 until his death.

After collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, he started to research previously forbidden topics, such as Russian medical émigrés (who left Russian after the October revolution of 1917), Stalinist repressions against medical doctors, and the impact of foreign physicians on Russian medicine and healthcare. Nevertheless it was a history of surgery that was the core of Mirsky’s research. His “Khirurgiya ot drevnosti do sovremennosti. Ocherki istorii”(“Surgery from Ancient Times to Present: Essays on History”) (published in 2000) is often considered his opus magnum. Almost 800 pages long, it surveys the period from the Edwin Smith papyrus to modern heart surgery.

His other major publication is “Meditsina Rossii X-XX vekov. Ocherki istorii”(“Medicine in Russia from the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries: Essays on History,” published in 2005). Here Mirsky called for a new approach to the history of Russian medicine and new ways of studying the subject devoid of ideological distortions. Just a few months before his death, “Istoriya Meditsiny i Hirurgii” (“ A History of Medicine and Surgery”) aimed at medical students was published.

Mark Mirsky always admired Russian literature. In 1994–95, he delivered lectures in Slavic departments of several German universities; the topics included a gunshot wound of a Russian poet Alexander Pushkin during his duel in 1837, as well as medical works of Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vikenty Veresaev, and other Russian physicians who became writers. His book on Chekhov as a physician was published in 2003.

Professor Mark Mirsky was a president of Moscow Scientific Society of Medical Historians since 1990. He was a member of the International Society for the History of Medicine, a vice-president of the Confederation of Medical Historians, and a Honorary Member of Polish and Byelorussian Societies of Medical Historians. He was concerned by the present lack of interest in the history of medicine in Russia, the decreasing number of Russian medical historians, and the deteriorating standards of research in the field...