Alexander Shalimov

Alexander Alekseyevich Shalimov was a Soviet and Ukrainian surgeon, born on 20 January 1918 and died on 28 February 2006 in Kyiv. One of eleven children in a farming family that moved to the Kuban region in 1925, he studied medicine there and completed his training at the Kuban State Medical University in Krasnodar in 1941. In 1944 he became chief physician and head of the surgical department of the city hospital in Petrovsk-Zabaykalsky, and from 1959 he held the chair of thoracic surgery and anesthesiology at the Kharkiv National Medical University. He later led surgery and research institutions in Kyiv, including the institute that now bears his name, the Shalimov National Institute of Surgery and Transplantation, and served as chief surgeon of the Ukrainian Ministry of Healthcare. He is believed to have performed some 40,000 operations and was named a Hero of Ukraine in 2005.