Oleksandr Bohomolets, the Divinely Gifted Doctor

He founded the national school of pathophysiology and headed the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He founded and headed the Institute of Experimental Biology and Pathology and the Institute of Clinical Physiology at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

Oleksandr Bohomolets made an invaluable contribution to world medical science: he developed effective methods of influencing connective tissues by anti-reticular cytotoxic serum, which he invented and which is known in the whole world as a function stimulator of connective tissues. Since 1940 it has been used worldwide to fight malignant tumors, heal wounds and fractures and enhance immunity to infections, as well as for other therapeutic purposes.

His teaching of tumor-body interactions fundamentally changed the traditional knowledge of tumor growth. He produced a great number of works on endocrinology, metabolic disorders, immunity, allergy, aging, etc. And one of his most important works, “Prolongation of Life,” is recognized internationally as one of the main reference books for gerontologists.

The National Medical University in Kyiv, one of the biggest and most renowned in Ukraine as well as globally, deservedly bears his name.

Oleksandr Bohomolets was born on May 24, 1881, in the central prison of Kyiv where his mother Sofia, who came from an aristocratic family, was kept in pretrial custody as an active member of the South-Russian Workers Union. She was arrested while she was pregnant. The prosecutor demanded the death penalty, but the sentence was humanely reduced to 10 years of hard labor in Siberia. Four weeks after the baby was born, the gendarmes handed him over to Sofia’s father who took him to his homestead in the Poltava province.

Sofia’s husband, a district doctor, also took part in the anti-tsarist revolutionary movement and was sentenced to several years of exile. The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who was the family’s friend and had an in with the highest authorities, asked them to pardon Sofia Bohomolets. All she had to do to go out was pledge to give up her anti-tsarist activities and ideas, but she refused and was convicted.

She saw her son for the second – and last – time almost ten years later, in 1891, when her husband, through Tolstoy’s assistance, got permission to visit her in Siberia.

The hard journey took six months, and when the father and son arrived, Sofia was dying of tuberculosis. The boy only saw his mother for three days, and all that she left behind for him was Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar. She bound the book with handmade canvas on which she embroidered three cornflowers.

Sofia was buried in Siberia, and her husband lived till the age of 90 but never looked another woman’s way.

In 1892, Oleksandr went to a gymnasium (middle school) in Nizhyn, a hundred miles east of Kyiv.

Ten years later, while studying at Odesa University and taking interest in endocrinology and the nervous system, he published his first research paper on the structure and physiology of duodenal glands. At the same time, he took part in the anti-tsarist student movement and several times faced expulsion from the university. Nevertheless, he graduated with honors in 1907.

In 1909 in St. Petersburg, Bohomolets defended his doctorate thesis on “the microscopic structure and physiological role of suprarenal glands in healthy and affected bodies.”

Immediately upon graduation, Bohomolets started working as an assistant at the general pathology chair of Novorossiysk University and got married a few weeks later.

In 1911, after pre-professorate training courses at the Louis Pasteur Institute and Sorbonne in France, Bohomolets, who had only just turned 30, was elected professor of the general pathology chair at the newly opened University of Saratov, Russia, where he started his legendary scientific school.

After the 1917 Bolshevik coup, he was engaged in public activities: he was a member of the local typhus commission and a consultant for the sanitary department of the Red Army’s South-East Front.

In 1925, Bohomolets moved to Moscow where he headed the pathophysiology chair at Moscow University and took an active part in organizing the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity, the Institute of Medical Biology, and the Institute of Blood Transfusion. During that period, he wrote important works on diathesis, endocrinology, vegetative exchange, edemas, and arterial hypertension.

In 1931, Bohomolets and a group of his disciples moved to Kyiv where they founded the Institute of Experimental Biology and Pathology under the Health Ministry and the Institute of Clinical Physiology under the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. It was in Kyiv where Bohomolets demonstrated his extraordinary organizational capability. Under his leadership the Academy was reorganized: in lieu of numerous separate chairs, commissions and offices he established an integral system of research institutes.

He led the group of authors of the multivolume work Fundamentals of Pathophysiology for which he was in early 1941 awarded the Stalin Prize, the highest public award at the time. Bohomolets founded The Physiology Journal, edited numerous scientific digests and organized annual medical conferences.

His biographers note one fact: Bohomolets was one of the very few scientists left intact by the horrible tsunami of the Stalin terror. They explain it by his indisputable authority in the scientific world, even though he was criticized a good deal (as all innovators usually are). Moreover, occupying a very high position, he was not a member of the Communist Party (which must have looked at least suspicious). The Soviet authorities had a case on him but never dared to raise a hand at the figure of international renown and acclaim: had anything happened to him, the Kremlin would have had to explain itself to the world.

Bohomolets suggested and later proved in practice that the onset, clinical course and outcome of a disease depend not only on its cause, but also on the human body’s reactivity which, in turn, depends on the condition of the nervous system and connective tissues. In order to enhance the functions of connective tissues in a number of diseases that suppress such functions, Bohomolets offered a special agent called “anti-reticular cytotoxic serum” (ACS).

Bohomolets also worked on blood transfusion. He proved that it did not only make up for blood deficiency but also increased reactivity.

During World War II, when his institute was evacuated to the east, he continued his ACS research to improve the properties of the serum which had proven to be a very good remedy for gunshot wounds and fractures and was widely and intensively used in hospitals. For his discovery he received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, the highest civilian award in the USSR.

When Ukraine was liberated from the Nazis in 1944, he returned to Kyiv together with the staff of the Academy of Sciences. Seeing and appreciating his titanic and tireless work, very few knew how hard it was for him to walk, let alone work… His health had been seriously undermined during that long trip to Siberia back in 1891…

Oleksandr Bohomolets passed away on July 19, 1946 in Kyiv, the city where he was born two revolutions and three wars before.

He handed down his talents and dedication to medicine to his offspring. His son Oleh, born in 1911, followed in his footsteps: he specialized in pathophysiology and was a correspondent member of the National Academy of Sciences. Like his father, Oleh loved music and kept a wonderful collection of gramophone records.

Medicine and music have always shared the heart of each member of the dynasty. Music has always sounded in their homes. Oleh’s daughters Kateryna and Oleksandra, who were doctors as well, loved Ukrainian folk songs and sang them wonderfully, too. And his granddaughter Olha, Doctor of Medicine, director of the Kyiv Institute of Dermatology and a member of the Kyiv City Council, is a gifted singer and composer. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2024, she gave concerts of her own lyrical songs to much applause.

She gave the youngest of her four children the name of her heroic great-grandmother Sofia, whose book with embroidered cornflowers on the cover she keeps and cherishes as the most precious family relic…