Nikolai Sergievich Korotkov
In February 1874, a genius was born in Kursk. Who is he? Why his name rings a bell? Why is he famous yet unknown to the world. Even most locals have no clue about him. So let's answer those questions.
Kursk city, Sovetskaya street, house 40. That was the address where Nikolai Korotkov was born. He studied in the prestigious Kursk Men’s Classical Gymnasium and graduated in 1893. The school described Nikolai Korotkov: “being under a good family influence, he was always in excellent behavior. Loved by all at home and at school, he has discovered a meek and accommodating character, he respects order and law”. Those were the words found in a recommendation letter from the school to the medical faculty of Kharkiv University where Nikolai was applying for further studies.
He chose the path of a doctor. In his first year of education at the university, he received excellent marks in zoology, botany, mineralogy, inorganic chemistry, and anatomy. In an effort to gain greater knowledge in the art of healing, Nikolai transferred to Moscow University after his third semester. In two months, he passed 24 exams “good” rating in most of them. On this basis, the University awarded him “Degree of Doctor of Medicine with distinction, with all rights and advantages” in 1898
Korotkov’s creative abilities and hard work were noticed at the faculty, where after graduation he was offered a position as a resident of a surgical clinic run by Professor A. Bobrov. The young doctor worked there for free, but he got an internship and improved his knowledge of surgery in one of the best medical institutions of the period.
Korotkov was given leave of absence to serve with the Russian military forces in the Far East during the Boxer Rebellion in China 1900. He was attached to the Red Cross in the Iversh Community. The journey to the Far East entailed extensive travel by way of the Trans-Siberian railroad, through Irkutsk to Vladivostok and he returned to Moscow via Japan, Singapore, Ceylon and the Suez Canal to reach the Black Sea and Feodosiya. Korotkov was honoured with the Order of St. Anna for “outstandingly zealous labours in helping the sick and wounded soldiers”.
A soldier with incomplete paralysis of the right arm was injured by a rifle bullet in the shoulder joint. Deep in the armpit of the unfortunate man was a throbbing tumor. Korotkov listened to it with a stethoscope and determined that it was an arterial aneurysm. Later, he often observed the same phenomena in soldiers admitted to the infirmary with vascular injuries. The doctor was tormented by doubts — whether is it possible to compress an artery without risk of losing an arm? Will it stay alive or will it become dead?
In the search for a solution to this problem, Korotkov looked for patients with aneurysms, listened to the vessels, compressing it externally and found sounds that changed strictly and naturally. He experimented with animals too, and proposed to measure blood pressure by capturing the first sound when the pressure in the inflatable cuff decreases, corresponding to the systolic (maximum) pressure, and the moment when the sounds disappear, which corresponds to the diastolic (minimum) pressure. Korotkov made an abstract of 281 words on “The question of methods for studying blood pressure”, which was published in 1906 in the “news of the imperial military medical academy”.
‘The cuff of Riva-Rocci is placed on the middle third of the upper arm; the pressure within the cuff is quickly raised up to complete cessation of circulation below the cuff. Then, letting the mercury of the manometer fall one listens to the artery just below the cuff with a children’s stethoscope. At first no sounds are heard. With the falling of the mercury in the manometer down to a certain height, the first short tones appear; their appearance indicates the passage of part of the pulse wave under the cuff. It follows that the manometric figure at which the first tone appears corresponds to the maximal pressure. With the further fall of the mercury in the manometer one hears the systolic compression murmurs, which pass again into tones (second). Finally, all sounds disappear. The time of the cessation of sounds indicates the free passage of the pulse wave; in other words at the moment of the disappearance of the sounds the minimal blood pressure within the artery predominates over the pressure in the cuff. It follows that the manometric figures at this time correspond to the minimal blood pressure.’
His method was met with a degree of skepticism and distrust by a number of well-known doctors at the time. The subject of debate was the understanding of the nature of the origin of sounds. but thanks to the simplicity and accuracy of measurement, despite the opinions, Korotkov’s method quickly began to spread triumphantly among doctors around the world, which soon became the standard method for auditory determination of blood pressure.
To further work on his doctoral dissertation and collect new material, Korotkov agreed to go to Siberia as a mining doctor in the Vitim-Olekminsky district, where he had to perform the functions of both surgeon and therapist. He went to Siberia to the Lena mines. where he witnessed the well-known brutal massacre of the unarmed workers and was deeply traumatized. In May 1914, he returned to St. Petersburg and worked as a senior doctor at the St. Petersburg clinical hospital. After the October revolution of 1917, N. S. Korotkov worked as the chief doctor of the Mechnikov hospital in Petrograd He died in 1920 of tuberculosis and is buried in Saint Petersburg.
In 1939, the joint committee of the American Heart Association and the Cardiology Society of UK introduced the “Korotkov Method” as the standard method for blood pressure, and has become a daily practice all over the world.
REFERENCE:
old-kursk.ru/people/korotkow.html
