Mikhail Nikiforovich Nikiforov. To the 165th anniversary of his birth*

Abstract

The article is devoted to the life and work of the prominent Russian pathologist, bacteriologist, scientist, educator and organizer, Doctor of Medicine, Honored Professor of Moscow University Mikhail Nikiforovich Nikiforov (1858–1915), who was born into a Moscow bourgeois family. In 1883, he graduated with honors from the medical faculty of the Imperial Moscow
University with the degree of a doctor and with the title of a district doctor. In 1887, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “On pathoanatomical changes of the spleen in recurrent fever”, in which he explained for the first time the origin of necrosis in the spleen in recurrent typhus. Throughout a relatively short but bright life, all scientific and
pedagogical activity was inextricably linked with Moscow University, where the scientist went from student to head of the department and his scientific interests were various issues of general and private pathology (inflammation, tissue regeneration, anemia, circulatory disorders,histogenesis of granulation tissue, tumors, pathology of the nervous system infectious and gynecological pathology) and medical microbiology (methods of histological and bacteriological research). He is the author of scientific publications, including the first atlas of pathological histology, the first domestic textbook on pathological anatomy, which was republished many times, and manuals. He created a large school of pathologists, was the founder of the Society of Moscow Pathologists and the first Chairman of this society, was the first in Russia to use microphotography to accurately reproduce pathohistological changes in illustrative material for lectures, proposed in the field of microscopic technology a number of methods for monitoring the growth of microbes, staining microbes in sections and fixing objects, and in 1888 he proposed the optimal composition of the mixture for fixing blood smears (“Nikiforov’s mixture”).
M. N. Nikiforov rose to the rank of Major General, active state councilor and held a number of important administrative posts. He died on June 23, 1915, in Moscow at the 57th year of life from angina pectoris and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Keywords:

Mikhail Nikiforovich Nikiforov, pathologist, bacteriologist, scientist, educator, Imperial Moscow University