Speranskii, Aleksei

Born Dec. 30, 1887 (Jan. 11, 1888), in Urzhum, in what is now Kirov Oblast; died July 23,1961, in Moscow. Soviet pathologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939) and the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1944). Member of the CPSU from 1943.

In 1911, Speranskii graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Kazan. In 1920 he became a professor of the subdepartment of operative surgery and topographic anatomy at the University of Irkutsk. From 1923 to 1928 he was an assistant to I. P. Pavlov. Simultaneously, in 1926, he organized and was head of the experimental department at the Institute of Surgical Neuropathology in Leningrad. Speranskii was head of the department of pathophysiology at the Leningrad Institute of Experimental Medicine from 1928 to 1934 and of the department of general pathology at the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine in Moscow from 1934. In 1945 he was appointed director of the Institute of General and Experimental Pathology of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. In 1954, after the institute was renamed the Institute of Normal and Pathological Physiology, he became head of the department of general pathology.

Speranskii was a proponent of nervism. His major works dealt with the role of the nervous system in the etiology, developmental mechanisms, course, and outcome of various types of pathological processes and the methodology of pathology and experimental therapy. Speranskii and the adherents of his school revealed the common and unique features of neural degenerations and established the role of the nervous system in the compensation of dysfunctions and convalescent processes.

Speranskii received the State Prize of the USSR in 1943 and the I. P. Pavlov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1937. He was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals.