Yurii Voronyi

Yurii Voronyi (1895 to 1961) was a Ukrainian surgeon, remembered for performing in 1933 the first attempt to transplant an internal organ from one person into another living person. The recipient died soon afterwards because the body rejected the organ, and it took until the work of Joseph E. Murray for a similar operation to succeed. Voronyi was born in Zhuravka, the son of the mathematician Georgy Voronoy. He entered the medical faculty of the Kyiv Imperial University in 1913, paused his studies to serve as a medic in the First World War and then with the Ukrainian People's Army, and graduated from the renamed Kyiv Medical Institute in 1921. He moved to Kharkiv in 1926 to study further, where an interest in blood transfusion and transplantation probably took hold after the experiments of Serge Voronoff. In 1931 he joined the city hospital in Kherson, the setting of the 1933 operation. He returned to Kharkiv in 1936, worked as a medic with Red Army units during the Second World War, and from 1950 held posts at institutes in Kyiv until his death.