Turning the pages back... February 17, 1859 (02/15/98)

Turning the pages back...

February 17, 1859

Mykola Hamalia, one of Eastern Europe's leading microbiologists and epidemiologists, was born on February 17, 1859, in Odesa and studied at the New Russian University in the port city before completing a degree at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg in 1883.

In 1886 he traveled to Paris to work with the giant of microbiology, Louis Pasteur, then returned to Odesa to found the first bacteriological station in the Russian Empire and to perform the first rabies vaccination. Hamalia then devoted himself to the study of communicable diseases, such as rabies, tuberculosis, cholera and cattle plague. He founded Odesa's Bacteriological Institute in 1899 and served as its director from its inception until 1908. In 1901-1902 he put his knowledge to practical use as his home town faced an outbreak of plague, then traveled to the Transcaucasus and the Volga region to combat cholera.

In 1910-1913 Hamalia founded and edited the first journal of hygiene and sanitary practice, another first in the empire. In 1912 he assumed the directorship of the Vaccination Institute in the imperial capital, St. Petersburg, staying on in his position following the Communist revolution, right up until 1928. In 1930 he began an eight-year term as director of the Central Institute of Epidemiology and Bacteriology in Leningrad.

In 1938 he was appointed chairman of the Second Moscow Medical Institute's microbiology department, and in the following year founded the All-Union Society of Microbiologists, Epidemiologists and Infectionists. In his final years he headed a laboratory at the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. Over his career Hamalia wrote over 300 scientific studies of rabies, the plague, cholera and smallpox, and contributed a number of important discoveries in the field of infectious disease. He died in Moscow on March 29, 1949.

Source: "Hamaliia, Mykola," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

| Home Page |