September 20, 1874
В Oryol province, was born into a teacher's family Nikolay Semashko. The first People's Commissar of Health of the RSFSR and organizer of the Soviet medical system.
Health is the most valuable thing a person has.
Since childhood, he dreamed of becoming a doctor: in his district, there was only one doctor for 40 people. He said his most powerful memory was the funerals of peasant children.
He entered the Moscow Medical University and studied under Sechenov и Sklifosovsky.
At 19 he joined the Marxists, at 21 he was arrested and expelled for participating in the revolutionary movement.
In 1901 he was able to graduate from the medical faculty in Kazan, worked as a rural doctor.
In 1905 he was arrested again for organizing a strike at the Sormovsky plant.
In 1906 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he met Lenin. Developed a project for workers' insurance for the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP.
I have lived through three tsars and three revolutions. But the main thing I was fortunate to work under the leadership of the great Lenin.
I owe everything I have done in my life to the Bolshevik Party.
In 1917 he returned to Moscow and helped the wounded during the October Revolution.
In 1918, he became People's Commissar of Health and developed the famous "Semashko system," which was copied by many countries.
Made Soviet medicine generally accessible and free.
He fought epidemics, infections and “independent paramedic work” on the ground.
He laid the foundations for sanitary matters and social hygiene (during the war, this made it possible to avoid large-scale epidemics and high mortality among the wounded).
All diseases are social, because they all depend on the conditions in which a person lives.
During his reign, institutes of nutrition and physical education, a prosthetic plant, sanatoriums, and a society for the fight against alcoholism were established for the first time.
As much vodka as the husbands drank, so many tears did their wives and children shed.
In 1947, he participated in the persecution of colleagues for publishing scientific achievements in the United States. He branded them traitors to the motherland.
Party comrades admired his "fighting spirit"—"the same as Lenin's." He shunned proper rest and vacations.
I want to do as much as possible for people.
He died in 1949, at 74.
