Luke Voyno-Yasenetsky

Valentin Felixovich Voyno-Yasenetsky (1877 to 1961) was a Russian surgeon who also became a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, and is known to the church as Saint Luke of Simferopol or Saint Luke the Blessed Surgeon. Born in Kerch and trained in medicine at Kiev University, he worked as a rural and military hospital surgeon and later in Tashkent and Krasnoyarsk. His book Sketches of Purulent Surgery (1934) remained a reference manual for surgeons, and his early monograph on regional anesthesia helped spread local anesthetic methods, including injection of the branches of the trigeminal nerve and the trigeminal ganglion. He developed new operations, among them a joint resection used for osteomyelitis of large joints. Ordained a priest in 1921, he spent about eleven years in internal exile for his religious activity, became archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea in 1946, and received the Stalin Prize in medicine the same year. He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1996.