For several centuries, a medical institution, called the Obukhov Hospital, has been operating and successfully functioning in St. Petersburg. Today, most of it is closed for large-scale reconstruction - which means it's time to remember its history and find out how it all began.
A few words about the name
Indeed, why is this hospital in St. Petersburg Obukhovskaya? After all, usually one or another serial number is assigned to all medical institutions. Everything is really very simple. The fact is that it was called so back in the distant years of the eighteenth century (and it was then that a hospital was built, but we will return to this), since the Obukhov bridge and the avenue of the same name were located next to it. Therefore, they did not begin to think for a long time - without further ado they slyly called the new hospital accordingly.
How it all began
Famous architects Quarenghi and Ruska - or rather, its first building erected on the Fontanka, gave life to the Obukhov hospital. This happened back in 1784, but, strictly speaking, this date cannot be considered a "birthday." The thing is that since the specified year the hospital has its own, separate, stone building, which was followed by many others.
However, in fact, the Obukhov hospital in St. Petersburg began its existence five years earlier - on the territory of the former estate of Artemy Volynsky, vegetating in several seedy wooden rooms. There were only sixty beds, while as many as three hundred entered the new stone building. It was decided to place a men's department there.
Further existence
The Obukhov hospital, which, by the way, became one of the first city hospitals, quickly gained popularity, and therefore grew rapidly. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, several more buildings were erected, in which various departments were located, including the female one.
Gradually, at the Obukhov city hospital, other buildings appeared, and not just medical buildings. So, the church was erected and subsequently consecrated in the name of the image of the Mother of God “Joy of All Who Sorrow”.
This happened in 1828, and at the same time, a few months earlier, the psychiatric department, or, rather, the house of the insane, "spun off" from the hospital. He became an independent hospital, which received a name similar to the church. And a year later, the first paramedic school with a four-year training course began to operate on the basis of the Obukhov hospital.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the hospital on the Fontanka Embankment became the largest scientific and treatment center in St. Petersburg, and by the beginning of the twentieth it only firmly established itself in this rank. It was confirmed by the fact that in the thirties of the last century the above hospital received the right to be the base for several medical institutes at once, and in 1932 the Higher Medical Courses began to work under it (later they were transformed into an independent university for future Hippocrates - Third Leningradsky).
From the middle of the century all kinds of associations, renaming and transformations began. The Obukhov hospital was tied together with the medical institute, as a result of which the Naval Medical Academy was born. During the Great Patriotic War, a naval hospital was located in its buildings. Some time later - and more precisely, in 1956 - just the Military Academy, bearing the name of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, was added to the Naval Academy.
Our days
Since the merger of the two academies back in 1956 in the buildings of the Obukhov hospital there are several departments and clinics related to surgery and hospital therapy, urology, propaedeutics and some other areas of medical science. The clinic has been successfully operating all these years, but for the fourth year now, starting in 2015, most of its departments have been closed for major repairs. Many buildings after it will significantly change their content.
So, in the main building after the reconstruction is completed, a large diagnostic and treatment center with various departments, including naval surgery, should appear. The educational building, which is also very worn out, will retain its building - but after the completion of all the work, the department of forensic medicine, the morgue and the pathology laboratory will be housed in the vivarium, after the completion of all the work. The changes will affect many other buildings, more precisely, what was inside them.
Hospital staff
It is interesting that when the hospital in the Obukhov hospital only began its work in the distant eighteenth century, there were only five people among the clinic staff: one doctor and four his assistants. A sharp increase in personnel began after the opening of the feldsher school and reached its peak by the end of the nineteenth century. Among the doctors who worked at different times in the Obukhov hospital, there are quite a lot of famous people.
For example, Ivan Grekov is a professor and surgeon who, incidentally, was also the head physician of the above-mentioned clinic in the late twenties and early thirties of the last century. Or Vladimir Kernig, who, in addition to being a highly qualified specialist in the field of therapy, has remained famous for history as one of the organizers of medical education for women - in our country, of course. Also, it was in the Obukhov hospital that Sergey Miramotsev worked and received patients, not only a participant in three wars (Russian-Japanese, World War I and World War II), but also a well-known surgeon, a member of the Academy of Sciences in Medicine.
Services
Even in the nineteenth century, the Obukhov hospital was paid. Then the patients were forced to unfasten for their treatment - in not very good initial conditions - four rubles, and later eighteen.
Today, despite the fact that free treatment in the clinic, of course, is carried out, paid services are also provided there. And these services are different - from consulting a doctor to a particular procedure or diagnosis. Another question is what exactly at the present time to obtain these procedures, consultations and others like them is hardly possible due to the current repair of the premises.
Contact Information
The address of the Obukhov hospital, or rather, its main building, which now houses the clinics of the Naval and Military Medical Academies, is easy to remember. This is the embankment of the Fontanka River, house number 106.
As for the other buildings of the hospital, they are scattered around the square of the Obukhov hospital and go, including Zagorodny Prospect.
How to get there
It is not difficult to find the right institution - it is practically the very center of the city, not far from Sadovaya and Sennaya Square. You should take the metro to the Technological Institute stop, get off to Fontanka and turn right. Less than a hundred meters and the hospital will be located.
Interesting Facts
- The most famous doctor, scientist, academician Nikolai Pirogov gave lectures at the Obukhov hospital in St. Petersburg and performed operations. There is a monument to him at the clinic.
- The Obukhov hospital was mentioned in their works The Queen of Spades and Levsha by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Leskov, respectively.
- It was the yellow color of the houses of the insane that served as the reason for the fact that all the houses of the insane were called “yellow houses”.
- Monuments of cultural and architectural heritage are three buildings of the hospital: the main one on Fontanka, the women's department and the medical department in memory of the Prince of Oldenburg.
- Sergey Yesenin from Angleterra was brought to this medical facility.
- In the first years of work, the hospital was notorious, because they did not want to take care of the poor and did not worry about the prevailing unsanitary conditions. Then this medical institution in St. Petersburg was simply called: "The Abode of Sorrow." Only when a feldsher school started working at the hospital did the situation radically change.
- In the twenties of the twentieth century in St. Petersburg, Lenka Panteleev, a bandit and a raider, terrified his gang and criminal acts. After he was killed during his arrest, his body was exhibited precisely in the morgue of the Obukhov hospital - so that the residents of the city could see for themselves that the terrible robber would do no harm to anyone else.
- It was in this medical institution for the first time in Russia that ether anesthesia, a plaster cast and an X-ray apparatus were started.
Such is the story of the Obukhov hospital - one of the oldest medical institutions in the city on the Neva.