DOI: 10.17720/2409-5834.v4.1.2017.06f

Vladimir I. Borodulin
FSSBI “N.A. Semashko National Research Institute of Public Health”

The author examines the role of the scientifi c elite as a distinctive and important factor in the development of domestic clini-cal medicine. The time frame in which this factor was infl uential is pinpointed – the fi rst three-quarters of the 20th century (it follows that this time frame was the same as for clinical research schools). Three basic conditions for the emergence of the clinical elite are set out (a high standard of scientifi c and public life, the existence of large clinical schools, the realization by the state and society as a whole of the role of scientifi c elites). The stages of the elite›s therapeutic activities are defi ned, which was conditional on rotations in the leading groups. The fact that medical congresses played a crucial role in the formation of the clinical elite in the fi rst half of the 20th century is demonstrated, and in the second half clinicians from the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) became a decisive factor in the nation’s scientifi c life. The therapeutic fi eld’s elite formed at the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century. It was left without V.N. Sirotinin and V.P. Obraztsov, but included such prominent leaders as N.Ya. Chistovich and M.V. Yanovsky (Petrograd), V.D. Shervinsky (Moscow) and F.G. Yanovsky (Kiev). The defi ning characteristics of the elite’s activities were its functional approach to the problems of disease and the development of instrumental and laboratory methods for functional diagnostics. The fi rst change of leadership in the therapeutic fi eld’s elite is shown to have occurred in the second half of the 1920s, and it was not accompanied by a change in the developmental direc-tion of internal medicine›s clinic practice in the Soviet Union, as the new leaders comprised mainly of students and successors to the Russian clinicians mentioned above. They included D.D. Pletnev and M.P. Konchalovsky (Moscow), S.S. Zimnitsky (Kazan), G.F. Lang (Leningrad) and N.D. Strazhesko (Kiev). With the creation of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, the institutionalization of clinical elites was completed. A description is provided of the therapeutic elite’s new leaders’ role in the context of the growing specialization of clinical medicine (1950−1970s).

Keywords: scientific elite, scientifi c schools, medical congresses, the history of internal medicine’s clinic practice