Boris Petrovitch Babkin 1877-1950

Abstract

D r Babkin died suddenly during the night of 2 May 1950, whilst returning from the annual meeting of the American Gastroenterological Association in Atlantic City. Boris Petrovitch Babkin, son of an army officer, was born on 17 January 1877 in Koursk, Russia. Little information is available of his boyhood days except that at high school in St Petersburg his chief interests were history and music. After much hesitation he chose in 1896 a career in medicine rather than in music and in 1898 entered the Military Medical Academy. When in his third year of study he decided to enter for a competition in which a gold medal was to be awarded for an essay, entrants being given the choice of three subjects, two clinical and one experimental. He selected the experimental subject and betook himself to Bechterev’s laboratory for his experimental investigations. There, he tells us ( Pavlov, a Biography, by B. P. Babkin, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949), he received little help except from the laboratory attendant ‘Peter’ who became his first director of research. In spite of these difficulties he was able to present his thesis at the end of a year, and received a diploma stating that he had been awarded the Gold Medal. His work was published in Russian in the Kazan Neurological Journal ( Nevrolgicheski Vestnik ) in 1901. After winning the competitive examinations in 1901, Babkin decided to take a postgraduate course in the history of medicine. This decision was determined by his early interest in history and by a lack of interest in clinical medicine. After discussions with Professor Volkov, who was Professor of Medicine in the Women’s Medical Institute, Babkin planned to combine studies in the history of medicine with work in the laboratory and clinic.