Pyotr Borovsky

Pyotr Fokich Borovsky (1863 to 1932) was a Russian and Soviet surgeon and public health administrator who spent most of his career in Tashkent. Born in Pogar in the Chernigov Governorate of the Russian Empire, he studied medicine and specialised in surgery at Kyiv University and the Military Medical Academy in Saint Petersburg, and in 1892 he was sent to the Tashkent Military Hospital to head its surgical department and its bacteriological laboratory. He was one of the founders of the Faculty of Medicine at Tashkent University, which later became the Tashkent Medical Institute, and he led its Department of Hospital Surgery from 1920 until his death. He is credited with the first correct description of the causative agent of Oriental sore, a skin disease also known as Sart sore. Examining sections of early sores under the microscope, he saw oval bodies with a nucleus inside host cells and concluded that they were protozoa. He published the finding in 1898 in a military medical journal of small circulation, so his priority was recognised internationally only much later. In 1927 he received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for his contributions to public health in the Uzbek SSR.