Chagovets, Vasilii

Born Apr. 18 (30), 1873, on the khutor (farmstead) of Patychis, Romny District, Poltava Province, now Sumy Oblast; died May 19, 1941, in Kiev. Soviet physiologist, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1939).

Chagovets graduated from the Military Medical Academy in 1897. He studied physiology in I. P. Pavlov’s laboratory at the academy from 1903 to 1909. In 1910 he became a professor at the University of Kiev (later the Kiev Medical Institute), occupying the chair of physiology in the medical faculty.

Chagovets primarily studied electrophysiology. He investigated the physicochemical nature of electric potentials in living tissues and the mechanism of the electrical stimulation of the tissues. Chagovets was the first to apply the theory of electrolytic dissociation to explain these processes. His ionic theory of the origin of bioelectric phenomena was of great importance to further studies of the mechanism of the occurrence of biopotentials. In 1906, Chagovets developed the capacitor theory of electrical stimulation of living tissues and proposed a physicochemical explanation of the stimulating action of an electric current. He demonstrated experimentally that living tissues polarize under the influence of an electric current, and he determined the magnitudes of electrical capacitance for several tissues.