Semen Girgolav

Born Feb. 2 (14), 1881, in Tbilisi; died Jan. 25, 1957, in Leningrad. Soviet surgeon. Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1944). Lieutenant general in the medical service.

Girgolav graduated from the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy in 1904. From 1919 to 1937 he was chairman of the academy’s department of general surgery and from 1937 until his death chairman of its department of hospital surgery. At the same time, after 1932, he was scientific director of the Leningrad Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics. During the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) he was assistant chief surgeon of the Soviet Army. His main work was on problems of general, military-field, and chest surgery and in the fields of traumatology, neurosurgery, surgical endocrinology and oncology, the healing of wounds and the pathology and therapeutics of thermal injuries. He worked out a system of classification of wounds. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1943 and was awarded two Orders of Lenin, four other orders, and various medals.