A grim story of a nineteenth century Russian surgeon who becomes a humanist philosopher.
Nikolai I. Pirogov distinguished himself in the fields of medicine and philosophy in a society disinclined to nurture mavericks. Completing his primary medical education at the young age of sixteen, he improved battlefield surgery, becoming an outstanding surgeon whose battlefield service in the Crimean War honed his innovative skills and made him an expert in amputating limbs. Alongside the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, he advocated and was responsible for the stationing of female nurses at his battlefield medical facility, promoting those who assisted him to increasingly responsible positions. Pirogov was a doctor whose authority to care for patients gave him–in his own words–the power of life and death over human beings. Later in life, he would become a philosopher writing about the ideas he had formulated as a humanist.
