Heart and blood

The Founder of Virology

Dmitry Iosiphovitch Ivanovsky, a prominent Russian scientist, was born in 1864. In 1888 he graduated from Petersburg University and began to study the physiology of plants and microbiology.

When D.I. Ivanovsky was investigating the tobacco mosaic disease he was able to come to the conclusion that this disease occurred due to a microscopic agent, many times smaller than bacteria.
To prove this phenomenon D.I. Ivanovsky had to make many experiments on various plants. He had to pass the juice of the diseased plant through a fine filter which was able of catch the smallest bacteria. At that time a little over 70 years ago everybody considered that bacteria were the smallest living organisms. But when D.I. Ivanovsky had completed to pass the juice through a fine filter, he was able to come to the conclusion that the living organisms smaller than bacteria existed in the environment, because when he introduced the filtrate of the diseased plants to healthy ones they became infected.
Before D.I. Ivanovsky was nobody had been able to prove the existence of viruses. Dmitry Iosiphovitch Ivanovsky was the first scientist who was able to establish the new branch of microbiology – virology.

Operations without a knife


Operations are quite frequent at the Moscow Eye Diseases Hospital. But there are some operations which are watched with special interest by the whole hospital. Such as cases of detached retina. Failure here leads to blindness.
"Each complicated operation especially in cases of such a serious condition as the detachment of the retina involves taking a risk," said surgeon Victoria Perlamutrova. "Our task is not only to restore the patient’s eyesight but to make the oper­ation short and painless. Recently I treated a young man who had lost sight of one eye 5 years ago because of the detach­ment of the retina. He came to us because he was losing the sight of his other eye, too. We had to save the second eye. Using the usual technique it would be necessary to open up the eye, operate and then treat it for a long time. But some­times we can perform the same operation without a knife, absolutely painlessly and in a few minutes. I used the method of photocoagulation on the young man. A special instrument is aimed at the pupil of the eye, a doctor finds the detached part of the retina and it is attached in place again by a strong beam of light."


Robert Koch

Robert Koch was a prominent German bacteriologist, the founder of modern microbiology. He was born in 1843, died in 1910. When Koch became a doctor he carried on many experiments on mice in a small laboratory. In 1882 Koch discovered tuberculosis bacilli. In his report made in the Berlin Physiological Society Koch described in detail the morphology of tuberculosis bacilli and the ways to reveal them. Due to his discovery Koch became known all over the world. In 1884 Koch published his book on cholera. This book included the investigations of his research work carried out during the cholera epidemic in Egypt and India. From the intestines of the men ill with cholera Koch isolated a small comma-shaped bacterium. He determined that these bacteria spread through drinking water. In 1905 Koch got the Nobel prize.