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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Bekhterev Vladimir Mikhailovich
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev was born on January 20 (February 1), 1857 in the family of a petty civil servant in the village of Sorali, Yelabuga district, Vyatka province. In 1865, his father Mikhail Pavlovich, who rose to the rank of collegiate secretary, died of tuberculosis. The family by that time lived in Vyatka. All worries about her fell on the shoulders of her mother, Maria Mikhailovna, nee Nazareva. In August 1867, the boy began classes at the Vyatka gymnasium, one of the oldest in Russia. After graduating from seven classes of the gymnasium in 1873, the young man successfully passed the exams for the Medical and Surgical Academy. He was enrolled in the first year of the medical department. On December 6, 1876, Vladimir Bekhterev, a fourth-year student at the Medical and Surgical Academy, took part with a group of comrades in a joint demonstration of workers and students, at which political demands were put forward. Actively participating in public life, Bekhterev at the same time did not forget that the main thing for him was the accumulation of knowledge. He studied successfully and already in the fourth year he determined his future profession. He decided to devote himself to neuropathology and psychiatry, which were then considered at the academy as a single clinical discipline. On April 12, 1877, Russia again entered the war. It was a Russo-Turkish war that was fought in the Balkans and the Transcaucasus. Professor of the Academy S. P. Botkin called on students of the Academy to take part in the summer military campaign of 1877. Vladimir Bekhterev, who had just completed his fourth year ahead of schedule, then joined the sanitary detachment, organized with the money of wealthy students - the Ryzhov brothers. Bekhterev returned from the front sick with "Bulgarian fever" and was hospitalized in a clinic where he was treated for about two months. The course of study at the Medico-Surgical Academy was quickly coming to an end. Although the war with the Turks ended with the Treaty of San Stefano on February 19 (March 3), 1878, the international situation remained tense. The Russian army was in dire need of doctors, and the final exams at the academy in 1878 were held ahead of schedule, from April 1 to April 20, Bekhterev was among three graduates who had more than two-thirds of excellent grades for the entire course of study at the academy. In this regard, he received a cash bonus of 300 rubles and, most importantly, the right to take an exam at the Institute for the Improvement of Doctors that existed at the academy, or, as it was often called, the "professorial" institute that trained scientific and pedagogical personnel. Bekhterev successfully passed the exam at the Institute for the Improvement of Doctors, receiving the highest score, however, like his comrades who were awarded this right, he was not enrolled in it. In view of the tense foreign policy situation, all of them entered the temporarily organized reserve of army doctors at the Clinical Military Hospital - the basic medical institution of the academy. As a result, Bekhterev turned out to be a trainee doctor at the clinic for mental and nervous diseases headed by I. P. Merzheevsky. In the clinic, Bekhterev worked enthusiastically. He read a lot and, in addition to medical activities, paid great attention to experimental research. In 1879, Bekhterev was accepted as a full member of the St. Petersburg Society of Psychiatrists. In September of the same year, Vladimir Mikhailovich married nineteen-year-old Natalya Petrovna Bazilevskaya, who studied at women's pedagogical courses. She arrived in St. Petersburg in 1877 from Vyatka, where her family lodged in the Bekhterevs' house. Thus, Vladimir knew both Natasha and her parents well back in his gymnasium years. The Bekhterevs rented an apartment not far from the Medico-Surgical Academy. Natasha turned out to be a good housewife and managed to create good working conditions for her husband. Now the young scientist did not always sit up in the clinic in the evenings. In the first months of family life, he usually spent the evenings at home. During this period, in 1880, he wrote a long-planned series of "everyday and ethnographic essays" published under the title "Votyaks, their history and current state" in two issues of the major St. Petersburg magazine "Bulletin of Europe". Ethnographic essays by V. M. Bekhterev received a significant response in wide circles of the Russian democratic public. For the first time, many learned from them the ugly details of the savage life of one of the many small nationalities that inhabited the Russian Empire. Doctor Bekhterev also became known as a publicist, able to reveal the social problems that were topical for the country. April 4, 1881 Bekhterev successfully defended his thesis for the degree of Doctor of Medicine. The conducted studies strengthened the position of supporters of the existence of the material basis of mental illness and the system in the life of the whole organism. Shortly after defending his dissertation "Experience in the clinical study of temperature in certain forms of mental illness" it was published as a monograph in Russian and German. Bekhterev was awarded the academic title of Privatdozent, after which he was allowed to give lectures on the diagnosis of nervous diseases to fifth-year students. In March 1884, he was enrolled in a clinic for mental illness in a full-time medical position. In May 1884, Professor I. P. Merzheevsky, Bekhterev's supervisor, proposed to the Conference of the Military Medical Academy to send Bekhterev to the countries of Western Europe to further improve scientific knowledge. The list of printed works of the young scientist by that time consisted of fifty-eight titles. Of particular interest was a series of clinical studies of peripheral and central balance organs, the materials of which were reflected in a number of articles and in the generalizing work "The Theory of the Formation of Our Concepts of Space". The experimental work of the scientist was important, which made it possible to clarify the function of the so-called tubercles located in the depths of the brain. By stimulating these brain structures in experimental animals, the scientist established for the first time that they "serve primarily for detecting those movements through which the emotional side of mental life is expressed." For the article "On forced and violent movements during the destruction of some parts of the central nervous system", written in 1883, which significantly supplemented information about the role of individual brain structures and the provision of motor functions, Bekhterev was awarded the silver medal of the Society of Russian Doctors. In the same year, he was elected a member of the Italian Society of Psychiatrists, which testified to the recognition of the merits of the young scientist outside of Russia. Bekhterev went abroad in June 1884. First he visited Germany, and then moved to Paris, where he first of all wanted to work with J. Charcot, the founder of the world's first department for neurological patients, opened at the hospital of the medical faculty of the university in the Salpêtrière suburb of Paris. In December 1884 Bekhterev, while in Leipzig, received an official invitation to take the chair in Kazan. He accepted the offer and shortened the trip, since by September 1885 he needed to return to his homeland. The Department of Psychiatry in Kazan Vladimir Mikhailovich had to reorganize. Having headed the department and the laboratory, Bekhterev had the opportunity to concentrate all his efforts on the implementation of a long-planned plan, to study the nervous system and the physiological, psychological and clinical problems associated with it as best as possible. The time has come for systematic knowledge of the essence of human nervous and mental activity in conditions of norm and pathology. The first stage of this knowledge was the study of the structure of the brain. Bekhterev wrote then that without knowledge of the morphology of the brain "... not a single neuropathologist and any doctor in general who claims to have a correct understanding of nervous diseases can do without it." He paid special attention to the study of the pathways of the brain, using many methods for studying the nervous tissue, in particular, the embryonic method, or the method of development. Bekhterev argued that individual areas of the cerebral cortex perform certain functions. In 1887, in the article “Physiology of the motor area of the cerebral cortex,” he wrote: “... I do not at all consider myself among those authors who look at the cortex as a mosaic consisting of separate pieces of different colors. The cerebral cortex, perhaps, is likened a map painted with separate colors in separate areas, but in such a way that neighboring colors, of course, mix with each other, and at the same time, perhaps, on this map there is not a single area covered with one color, and not mixed from a multitude of colors. This idea of V. M. Bekhterev later found development in the teachings of I. P. Pavlov on the projection and associative fields of the cerebral cortex. Morphological and physiological studies conducted by Bekhterev in the laboratories of Kazan University formed the basis of a large number of his publications and continued in subsequent years at the Medico-Surgical Academy. Throughout his life, Vladimir Mikhailovich was convinced that there was no clear line between nervous and mental illnesses. He drew attention to the fact that nervous diseases are often accompanied by mental disorders, and with mental illness, signs of organic damage to the central nervous system are also possible. The accumulated clinical experience allowed him to publish works in neuropathology and related disciplines. The most famous of them was his article "Stiffness of the spine with its curvature as a special form of the disease", published in the capital's magazine "Doctor". The disease described in this article is currently known as ankylosing spondylitis, or Bechterew's disease. Many neurological symptoms first identified by the scientist, as well as a number of original clinical observations, were reflected in the two-volume book "Nervous Diseases in Individual Observations", published in Kazan. In 1891, the scientist turned to the administration of the Faculty of Medicine with a proposal to organize a neurological scientific society in Kazan. Consent to the creation of such a society was obtained, and Bekhterev was unanimously elected chairman. Since 1893, the Kazan Neurological Society began to regularly publish its own printed organ - the journal Neurological Bulletin, which was published until 1918 under the editorship of Vladimir Mikhailovich. In the spring of 1893, Bekhterev received an invitation from the head of the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy to take the chair of mental and nervous diseases, which was vacated due to the resignation "for seniority" of Merzheevsky, Vladimir Mikhailovich's teacher. Bekhterev arrived in St. Petersburg at the end of September and immediately got to work. He began to create the first neurosurgical operating room in Russia. Bekhterev sought to create a specialized neurosurgical service, believing that surgeons who have mastered neuropathology, or neuropathologists who have learned to operate, can become neurosurgeons. At the same time, he clearly preferred neurosurgeons from neuropathologists. The scientist himself did not operate, but took an active part in the diagnosis of neurosurgical diseases. In the laboratories of the clinic, Bekhterev, together with his staff and students, continued numerous studies on the morphology and physiology of the nervous system. This allowed him to complete the materials on neuromorphology and begin work on the fundamental seven-volume work Fundamentals of the Teaching of Brain Functions. Then he began to pay great attention to the study of psychology. In 1894, Vladimir Mikhailovich received the first general rank of a real state councilor. At the end of the same year, he was appointed a member of the medical council of the Ministry of the Interior, and in 1895 - a member of the military medical scientific council under the Minister of War and at the same time - a member of the council of the mentally ill. The work capacity of the scientist was amazing. From 1894 to 1905 he completed between fourteen and twenty-four scientific papers annually. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that the scientist never signed a work written by another. Everything published under his name was written by his own hand. In November 1900, the two-volume "Conducting Pathways of the Spinal Cord and Brain" was nominated by the Russian Academy of Sciences for the Academician K. M. Baer Prize. On December 29 of the same year, at the solemn meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, professors V. M. Bekhterev and I. P. Pavlov were presented with the award awarded to them. It would seem that after such a success, you can relax for some time, but such a pastime was unusual for a scientist. The accumulated life and scientific experience prompted generalizations and philosophical interpretations. In 1902, he published the book Mind and Life, in which he expressed his opinion on the essence of mental processes, on the relationship between being and consciousness, the psyche and life. By that time, Bekhterev had prepared for publication the first volume of his fundamental work, Fundamentals of the Doctrine of the Functions of the Brain, which became his main work on neurophysiology. In it, he sought to bring into a strict system all the information accumulated in the literature and independently obtained in laboratory studies and in the process of clinical observations on the activity of the nervous system. In the book, he not only summarized all the known data on the functions of the brain, but also described the function of all its departments, based on his own long-term experimental and clinical studies. The first volume, which was published in 1903, outlined the general principles of the activity of the brain. In it, in particular, Bekhterev presented the energy theory of inhibition, according to which the nerve energy in the brain rushes to the center that is in an active state. It seems to flow to him along the pathways connecting individual areas of the brain, first of all, from nearby areas of the brain, in which, as Bekhterev believed, "a decrease in excitability, therefore, oppression" occurs. After the completion of work on the seven volumes of Fundamentals of the Teaching about the Functions of the Brain, special attention of Bekhterev as a scientist began to be attracted to the problems of psychology. Proceeding from the fact that mental activity arises as a result of the work of the brain, he considered it possible to rely mainly on the achievements of physiology, and, above all, on the doctrine of combinational (conditioned) reflexes. Bekhterev spoke out that "there is not a single subjective phenomenon that would not be accompanied by objective processes in the brain in the form of a current running through nerve cells and fibers, which is ... in appearance an act of chemical-physical." Following Sechenov, Bekhterev argued that "the so-called mental phenomena are reflexes." In 1907-1910, Bekhterev published three volumes of the book "Objective Psychology", in which he outlined the main ideas of a new direction in psychological science created and developed by him. The scientist argued that all mental processes are accompanied by reflex motor and vegetative reactions that are available for observation and registration. Based on objective criteria, he considered it possible to study not only conscious, but also unconscious mental phenomena. In the first volume of "Objective Psychology" Bekhterev proposed to single out the psychology of individual, social, national, comparative, and also zoopsychology. In addition, he recognized the need to single out the psychology of childhood "as a science that studies the laws and sequence of the mental development of individual individuals." In 1915, on the initiative of Vladimir Mikhailovich, an orphanage with a kindergarten and a school for refugee children from the western provinces was established at the Psychoneurological Institute. Constantly being in the thick of the public life of the capital, Bekhterev still paid much attention to the Psychoneurological Institute. After the October Revolution, Academician Bekhterev immediately joined in the creation of the health care of the young republic. In May 1918, Bekhterev applied to the Council of People's Commissars with a request to organize a research institution - the Institute for the Study of the Brain and Mental Activity. Soon the institute was opened, and Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev was its director until his death. Bekhterev died on December 24, 1927. Author: Samin D.K.
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