Nikolai Korotkov

Nikolai Sergeyevich Korotkov, also spelled Korotkoff (1874 to 1920), was a Russian surgeon who pioneered vascular surgery in the early twentieth century and devised the auscultatory method of measuring blood pressure. Born into a merchant family in Kursk, he trained in medicine at Kharkov and Moscow, served as a surgeon with Red Cross units during the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War, and later worked in St. Petersburg. In 1905 he reported in less than a page that, by placing a stethoscope below a Riva-Rocci cuff and listening as the pressure fell, a clinician could identify both the maximal and minimal blood pressure from the appearance and disappearance of sounds. The method, also known as the Korotkov-Yanovsky method, remains the standard clinical technique, and the sounds and a collateral-circulation test carry his name. He died of tuberculosis in Petrograd in 1920, and a hospital in Kursk bears his name.