Aleksander Aleksandrovich
Vishnevsky
1906-1975
Aleksander Aleksandrovich Vishnevsky was the Chief surgeon of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR, Colonel-General of the medical service. He was born in the city of Kazan, in the family of the outstanding Russian Soviet surgeon Aleksander Vasilyevich Vishnevsky. In 1929 he graduated from the Medical Faculty of Kazan University and began teaching there. He was in the Red Army from 1931 to 1933, from 1939 to 1940 and from 1941. In 1931-33 he taught at the Military Medical Academy of the Red Army, engaged in scientific and clinical work. Since 1939 he headed the surgical department of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine. He participated as a consultant surgeon of the 1st Army Group in combat operations against Japanese militarists near the Khalkhin-Gol River (Mongolia) in 1939. He was a participant of the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he was in the active army. He was an army surgeon and a chief surgeon of the Volkhov and Karelian fronts. A.A. Vishnevsky developed and introduced effective methods of treatment of gunshot wounds, benefits by which military doctors managed to save every third wounded person. After the Great Patriotic War A.A. Vishnevsky was the chief surgeon of the Primorsky and then Moscow military districts. Since 1948 he was the director of the Vishnevsky Institute of Surgery and simultaneously, since 1956, he was the Chief Surgeon of the USSR Ministry of Defence. Developing the problems of military field surgery, A.A. Vishnevsky conducted important research on anesthesia, extensive work in the field of surgery of the lungs, heart and blood vessels, compensation for impaired functions of organs and systems. He worked on the application of cybernetics, electronics and the use of lasers and polymers in surgery. In 1953 Vishnevsky performed heart surgery under local anesthesia for the first time in the world, and in 1957 he performed the first successful open-heart surgery in the Soviet Union using a domestic artificial blood circulation device. In the same year, he was elected as an Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. By the decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR in 1963, Lieutenant General of the medical service A.A. Vishnevsky was awarded the military rank of “Colonel General of the medical service”. Outstanding military surgeon A.A. Vishnevsky was one of the largest organizers of medical science, as evidenced by more than two hundred of his scientific works, which have received recognition in the USSR, modern Russia and abroad. The name of Academician A.A. Vishnevsky was associated with the first intracardiac operation in the USSR in conditions of hypothermia (cooling), a human heart transplant, the development and implementation of electropulse treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. Under the leadership of A.A. Vishnevsky for the first time the research on artificial blood circulation, heart sounding, lung ventilation, gas exchange, respiratory mechanics, and the development of new types of medical equipment was carried out.
Address: Moscow, Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya str., 27, p. 7
