Valentina Valentinovna Gorinevskaya was born in 1882 and graduated from the St Petersburg Medical Institute for Women in 1908. She worked in the surgical clinic of Peter and Paul Hospital from 1908 to 1914. When World War I began in 1914, Gorinevskaya became the first woman to become a senior surgeon in a military hospital of the Imperial Russian Army (). "There was little fighting on the Allied eastern front in 1917, but nevertheless, hundreds of casualties had accumulated by this time in military hospitals". After the war, she became a professor of general surgery at Samara University in 1919 before moving to Moscow, where she was the head of the surgical department at the Obukh Institute. Then she became a surgeon at the Traumatological Department of the Institute of Therapy and Prosthetics professor of surgery at the Central Institute of Postgraduate Medical Training. Gorinevskaya joined the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( and served as the chair of field surgery in 1931–1939 and chief surgeon during the Khalkhin Gol Campaign of 1939. She served as a senior inspector of the Main Military Medical Board during World War II and died in 1953.