[Deathwatch] Fyodor Uglov, oldest practicing surgeon, 103

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Fyodor Uglov
Last updated: 25/06/2008
Surgeon and anti-alcohol campaigner who continued to work until the age
of 102

Fyodor Uglov, who died on Monday aged 103, earned an entry in 1994 in
the Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest practising surgeon,
and laid down his scalpel only at the age of 102.

Over his career, which began in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, he
performed thousands of operations, pioneered many new procedures ?
especially in heart and lung surgery ? and wrote hundreds of articles.

During the 900-day siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1941-43,
he saved hundreds of lives of wounded soldiers and civilians,
performing surgery ? often without anaesthetic, electricity or water ?
as the bombs rained all around.

On one occasion a shell exploded outside the window as he was
performing an operation, sending glass flying everywhere.

Without thinking of his own safety, Uglov bent over the patient to
protect the wound from the splinters. When the nurse told him that the
explosion had made her drop the only clean scalpel on to the floor, he
finished the operation using a safety razor.

While he was celebrated by his fellow countrymen for his achievements
as a surgeon, Uglov's prescription for a long life (and steady hands)
did not go down so well.

Moscow's Centre Television, which held him up in 2004 as an
advertisement for a healthy lifestyle, summed it up in a slogan, "No
vodka, no tobacco" ? he also took a cold shower every morning.

Uglov founded Russia's first anti-drinking campaign organisation and
warned in 1985 that unless the state introduced complete prohibition
"the Soviet nation will disappear".

He blamed the problem on bureaucrats who saw in alcohol sales the
easiest way to generate revenues, and on ethnic non-Russians in the
media who, in his view, opposed the idea of a sober Russian nation (in
a 1986 book he openly blamed pre-revolutionary alcoholism on Jews).

To the nation's millions of alcoholics, the message was not a popular
one ? and in the end it was Glasnost, rather than alcohol, that did the
trick.

One of six children, Fyodor Uglov was born at Chuguevo, a village in
Siberia, on October 5 1904.

After graduating in 1929 from the Saratov University medical faculty he
worked first as a local doctor, then as a surgeon in Abkhazia and
Irkutsk, before moving to Leningrad in 1937. After the war he joined
one of the city's leading teaching hospitals as chief surgeon and,
eventually, professor. Though he specialised in heart and lung surgery,
he operated on most internal organs and was admired for his speed and
precision.

He wrote more than 600 scientific works, of which monographs on lung
cancer and lung resection were the most widely read, and was allowed to
travel abroad to address scientific symposia. He also published eight
novels, a book of memoirs entitled A Century is not Enough, and he
edited the Russian Bulletin of Surgery. In 1967 he became the first
director of the Soviet Institute of Pulmonology.

Uglov was a member of Russia's Medical Sciences Academy and an honorary
member of many foreign scientific societies. His awards included two
orders of the Labour Red Banner, the Order of Friendship of the
Peoples, the Lenin Premium and the Russian National Olympus Prize. His
motto was: "There are no completely hopeless situations, and there
should always be a way out."

At the age of 60 he married Emiliya Viktorovna, a woman half his age.
At the age of 102 he wore no spectacles and could still recite
Pushkin's poems by heart. Although he put his longevity down to
abstinence, his wife attributed it to hard work and independence of
mind. "It's impossible to control him," she complained in 2004. "People
often say this becomes easier with age, but no, if you speak to him in
the wrong tone he just puts on his coat and goes out."


Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary