The development of medical pedagogy in Russia in the first half of the 19th century

Abstract

This article analyses the specific features of the development of medical pedagogy, an area of pedagogy that includes professional pedagogy, and the methods used to teach individual professional disciplines in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the new system of clinical training for future doctors that emerged in the 1830s and was implemented by Nikolai Pirogov, Nikanor Skandovsky, Fyodor Inozemtsev, Alexei Filomafitsky, Grigory Sokolsky and Iosif Varvinsky, graduates of the Professorial Institute in Dorpat. The authors examine the methods used  to  communicate  professional  knowledge  and  experience  by  the  young  professors,  who,  as  recalled  by  their former students, were able to grab their audience’s interest and “infect” them with their enthusiasm for the subject being taught. The teachers achieved a high level of expertise thanks to their systematic work on the content of their lectures and the methods they used to present their material. The authors show that the combination of treatment practices with research and teaching activity may be regarded as one of the basic principles of medical pedagogy in this period. Pirogov’s concept of scientific education entailed students rapidly developing the skills needed to work with specialist literature, and the ability to use it freely and competently. In their research and teaching activities, the young professors paid a great deal of attention to methodological support for the teaching process: they developed course programmes, procedural guidelines, textbooks and teaching materials. At the same time, their activities were not confined to universities: they did a lot of outreach work. Thanks to the graduates of the Professorial Institute, an idea of the professional qualities required by a professor of medicine emerged in the higher medical education system in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century.