24 Dec 1927
A 70-year-old neurologist and psychiatrist has died in Moscow (according to another version, he was poisoned). Vladimir Bekhterev. The founder of reflexology and pathopsychology.
Fanaticism liquefies the brain
Born in 1857, in a Vyatka village on the territory of today Tatarstan. At 8 he lost his father, a police officer.
He graduated Vyatka gymnasium and Petersburg Medical and Surgical Academy. During the Russo-Turkish War, as a 20-year-old student, he joined a volunteer medical detachment, helping the wounded on the front lines.
After graduating from the academy, he studied mental and nervous illnesses in the clinic of a prominent professor, chairman of the society of psychiatrists and a secret imperial adviser. Ivan Merzheevsky.
In 1884, he was sent by the Academy on a scientific mission abroad. He studied at Berlin, Munich, Paris, Leipzig и Vienna. Upon returning, he worked in Kazan district mental hospital and taught at the university.
In 1893, he became head of the Department of Nervous and Mental Diseases at his alma mater in St. Petersburg. He taught at the first Women's Medical Institute. He served as a medical advisor to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Minister of War, and the Imperial Mental Health Center.
Empress Alexandra Feodorovna is an ordinary, beautiful hysteric.
In 1907, he founded the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg—the world's first scientific center dedicated to psychology, psychiatry, and neurology. He studied the psyche from the perspective of physiology and conditioned reflexes. He explored the relationship between neurology and psychology: a spinal joint disorder (Bechterew's disease) and a medication with sedative properties (Bechterew's mixture) are named after him.
He organized a society of psychoneurologists in St. Petersburg and published several journals, including “Neurological Bulletin” and “Questions of Alcoholism.”
In 1912, he opened Russia's first experimental clinical institute for the study of alcoholism. He attempted to treat it using hypnosis and suggestion.
Alcoholism is such a social evil that it is difficult to overestimate
In 1913 he was one of the medical experts on the high-profile Beilis case (regarding the ritual murder of a 12-year-old boy). He did not succumb to government pressure and provided an objective conclusion, guided by the principles of evidence-based medicine.
He greeted the Bolshevik Revolution with enthusiasm (most doctors boycotted the new government). In May 1918, at the height of the Civil War, his psychoneurological institute was transferred to the state budget. Simultaneously, a decree was issued establishing a new Institute of the Brain—it was allocated a palace building on Petrovskaya Embankment and a subsidy of over 2 million rubles (including 40 in gold for equipment and travel abroad).
He headed the institute for the rest of his life. Shortly before his death, he married for the second time - to Brete Gurzhi, Yagoda's niece (she was 30 years younger than Bekhterev and was executed for espionage in 1937).
Happiness drowns out a person's sense of justice and compassion.
From the first months of Soviet power, he served as a Kremlin consultant. In 1923, he confirmed Lenin's brain syphilis.
[I found him] broken down by right-sided paralysis, without speech, without the ability to read and, apparently, deeply suffering from the inability to speak, but retaining within himself the hope of finding salvation in medicine
Bekhterev died suddenly during the First All-Union Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists. He was cremated, and the urn containing his ashes and his brain, preserved in a jar of formalin, were transported to the Brain Institute.
According to the official version, death was caused by poisoning from canned food or sandwiches. A rumor circulated among doctors that Bekhterev had recently told Stalin that he suffered from severe paranoia. Bekhterev's granddaughter refuted this theory in 1995.
Bekhterev's great-grandson is certain that his death was connected to Lenin's treatment (he allegedly insisted on administering drugs to treat syphilis of the brain).
At the moment, none of the versions have been confirmed.
To overcome the fear of death, one must live in such a way that one remains aware of a life not lived in vain, and one must be in constant readiness to die.
