The Lancet, a leading medical Journal in an article in its 2017 issue describes Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev as the most productive Russian scientist of his time. He published more than scientific 1700 papers. There are about twenty clinical signs, structures, diseases and phenomenon that carry his name. Most famous of these is Bekhterev’s disease, we know today as Ankylosing spondylitis. He also founded institutions and organisations in neurological sciences.
Journey to the top
Born in 1857, Bekhterev completed his initial medical education from St Petersberg in 1878. He chose neurological sciences as his field of work. At that time functioning of the brain and its structure was obscure. It was known as “textura obscura”. In 1884-85 he secured a scholarship to study neurology with leaders in his field such as Paul Emil Flechsig, Wilhelm Wundt, and Jean-Martin Charcot. His initial focus was neuropathology. In 1893 he wrote a textbook Conduction Paths in the Spinal Cord and Brain, which he revised in 1896. This was the most authentic neurology resource on the topic at that time.
Later he got interested in Psychoneurology. He established an institute of psychoneurology at St Petersberg in 1907. He devoted his later research to biosocial concept of human disease. Later in 1925 the same institute was named after him, during his lifetime.
Mystery of his death
The period from 1917-1924 was a tumulous period in Russia. The revolution ended the rein of the Tsars and it was followed by the civil wars. Russia was home to many eminent neurologists at this time, including Bekhterev, Betz, Brudzinski, Darkshevich, Filimonov, Kernig, Korsakov, Kozhevnikov, Minor, Pavlov, Puusepp, and Rossolimo amongst others. Many of these neurologists had aligned with Lenin, worked as well as competed with each other. Most of their work was in Russian, and they have clinical signs and diseases named after them. One of the collective desire was to Pantheon of Genius Brains and to identify mysteries behind superior human intellect. Russian neurology and psychiatry congresses were international events at this time.
His death remains a mystery. In 1927, he was 70, and in excellent health. He was chairing Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists of Soviet Russia in Moscow. He was called from this neurology congress to consult Joseph Stalin. At that time, Stalin had succeeded Lenin as the supreme soviet leader. When Bekhterev returned, he remarked to his colleagues “I examined a paranoid with the dry hand.” Indeed Stalin was paranoid, and he also had a shortened left hand. It is believed that he had syringomyelia, a disease of the spinal cord. It seems that the comment reached back to Stalin the very next day.
Probably Bekhterev was secretly poisoned the next day, or so many believe. He was attending a dinner of all Russian neurologists and Psychiatrists, and here he was offered a cake by two secret-service ‘physicians’. Within hours he started vomiting, and soon after became unconscious. He died a day later on 24th December 1927. While he was cremated, his brain was preserved. Along with Lenin and many others, his Brain was studied in Pantheon of Brains, Moscow.
Meanwhile, Stalin erased his name from any public records. His children were exiled to Siberia, where they later died.He memory was remembered and rehabilitated only after 1953, when had Stalin died.
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