Bakulev, Aleksandr

Born Nov. 25 (Dec. 7), 1890, in the village of Nevenikovskaia, Viatka Province; died Mar. 31, 1967, in Moscow. Soviet surgeon. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958). Member (1948) and president (1953–60) of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. Hero of Socialist Labor (1960). Graduated from the medical department of the University of Saratov in 1915.

Bakulev worked from 1919 as an intern in the surgical clinic of the University of Saratov under the direction of S. I. Spasokukotskii. He worked in the subdepartment of surgery of the Second Moscow Medical Institute from 1926, and in 1943 he became its head. Along with his work there, from 1955 he directed the Institute of Chest Surgery which he established (now the Bakulev Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery). Bakulev was a versatile surgeon and the creator of a school of surgeons. He worked in the development of surgery of the kidneys, bone surgery, and surgical treatment of ulcerous disease, and he studied tumors of the mediastinum and the lungs. Bakulev was one of the pioneers of neurosurgery in the USSR—for example, he worked out a method for the conservative treatment of abscesses of the brain. During the Great Patriotic War, he introduced a method for the active treatment of bullet wounds and the active removal of foreign bodies; he also developed methods for carrying out surgical treatment in the case of wounds of the spine and skull with the uncovering of the brain, and so on.

For his work on problems of pulmonary surgery Bakulev was awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1949), and for his work on heart surgery (in 1948 he became the first surgeon in the USSR to carry out an operation necessitated by a congenital heart defect), he was awarded the Lenin Prize (1957). He was a deputy to the third through fifth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was awarded three Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and medals.