Bust of Pauls Stradiņš
The bust of Pauls Stradiņš is located in front of Viesīte secondary school at Valņu street 7. Sculptor – Kārlis Jansons, architect – Edvīns Vecumnieks. Opened on November 1, 1987.
Pauls Stradiņš
Pauls Stradiņš (17 January 1896 – 14 August 1958) was a Latvian professor, physician, and surgeon who founded the Museum of the History of Medicine in Riga.
Early life
Stradiņš was born in Eķengrāve (German: Eckengraf) (now Viesīte, Jēkabpils Municipality) as the son of a craftsman and pub owner. He graduated from the Riga Alexander Gymnasium in 1914 and entered the S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), where his professors included the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov.
Medical education
During World War I, Stradiņš was an army doctor on the Russian Western Front and in Persia, and then the chief of a surgical department in Vladivostok. After graduating from the military medical academy in 1919, he became an institute doctor (i.e., a candidate for an M.D. degree) in the academy's hospital surgery clinic, headed by Professor Sergey Fedorov, the former private surgeon of Tsar Nicholas II. Under Fedorov's supervision, Stradiņš completed a doctoral thesis on the treatment of peripheral nerve injury. It included data from 862 patients on trophic, secretory and vasomotor disturbances after injuries to the extremities, and on surgical and nonsurgical treatment methods.
In 1919, Stradiņš, working with N. N. Yelanski, I. R. Petrov, and other colleagues, produced the first standard serum for blood transfusion in Soviet Russia. Three years later, he ran an experiment on himself: A periarterial sympathectomy (pioneered by Mathieu Jaboulay) was performed on his left shoulder by V. N. Shamov, and Stradiņš personally evaluated the results. He also carried out physiological and pharmacological experiments in the laboratories of the physiologist Ivan Pavlov and pharmacologist Nikolai Kravkov.
Fedorov regarded Stradiņš as one of his "best and most gifted pupils, and his works on the spontaneous gangrene and operations on nerves as indubitably excellent".
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