Nikolai Velyaminov

Nikolai Alexandrovich Velyaminov (1855 to 1920) was a Russian surgeon who spent much of his career improving medical care in the Imperial Russian Army. Born in Saint Petersburg into an army officer's family, he was schooled in Wiesbaden and Warsaw and graduated in medicine from Moscow State University in 1877. As a military medic in the Russo-Turkish War he brought antiseptic methods into the operating room, and during the Geok Tepe campaign of 1880 and 1881 he introduced the principle of triage to sort the wounded. In 1885 he began publishing The Surgeon's Herald, the first Russian journal for surgeons, and edited it for the rest of his life. He taught at the Academy of Battlefield Medicine, served as surgeon to Tsar Alexander III, helped organize the Russian Red Cross, and introduced mobile medical stations and medical trains during the Russo-Japanese War. He was an early Russian user of light therapy and described a form of joint disease linked to an overactive thyroid. After the October Revolution of 1917 he criticized the Bolshevik regime and lost his posts and honors; he died in Petrograd in 1920.