Yuriy Voronyy

Yuriy Voronyy (5 August 1895 - 13 May 1961) was a Ukrainian Soviet surgeon who performed the world’s first documented clinical kidney transplant.
==Early life and education[edit]==
Georgi Georgievich Voronii was born in 1895 in Zhuravka of the Piryatinsky district of the Poltava province (now Chernihiv region) to the family of professor-mathematician of the University of Warsaw, Georgy Voronoy and noblewoman O. M. Kritskaya.
Voronyy had four sisters and a brother. One sister died as a child. Alexandra graduated from the Higher Women's Courses. His older brother Alexander was a doctor who worked in Yagotyn. In 1938 he was arrested and did not return from exile. The youngest sister Elena became a dentist, and Maria, the middle sister, taught Ukrainian at the school of the White Church.
Voronyy began to study in Warsaw, after the premature death of his father at the age of 41, entered the Priluk gymnasium (now Chernihiv region), which he graduated in 1913 at the medical faculty of St. Vladimir University in Kiev was enrolled in the same year.
During the Second World War (September 20, 1915 - April 19, 1916), as a medical student, he worked in the dressing detachment of the South-West Regional Zemstvo Committee for Assistance to Sick and Wounded Soldiers.
On January 5, 1921, the Scientific Council of the Kiev State Medical Academy awarded him the title of doctor. At this time, Voronyy changed his name to Yuri Yurievich.
==Career and research==
In 1921 Voronoi graduated from the Kiev Medical Institute and was enrolled as a professorial fellow of the Department of Surgery, which was headed by Professor E.G. Chernyakhovsky, his first teacher. From October 1923 to September 1926 he was a resident and graduate student of this department. After graduation Voronoy was appointed assistant of the Kharkiv Medical Institute. 
From 1931 to 1934. Voronoi worked as the chief doctor of the hospital in Kherson, director and professor of surgery of the Kherson Production Medical Institute, and then - senior researcher of the All-Ukrainian Institute of Emergency Surgery and Blood Transfusion, which in those years was headed by the famous scientist-surgeon V.M. Shamov, who became the teacher of Y. Voronoi. Later, in 1936-1941, Voronoy headed the Department of Surgery of the Kharkiv Dental Institute. During the war he found himself in occupied territory and was deported abroad. 
Upon his return to his homeland, Voron was forbidden to teach surgery in Kharkov, so he moved to Zhytomyr, where from 1944 to 1950 he worked as a urologist at the city and regional hospitals. From 1950 Voronoi lived in Kiev, headed the department of experimental surgery of the Institute of Experimental Biology and Pathology (1950-1953) and the same department of the Kiev Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion (1953-1960).
Vorona became interested in transplantology in the 1920s, when he was a graduate student of Professor Chernyakhovsky and took part in his experiments on kidney transplantation. Under the guidance of Professor V.M. Shamov (Kharkiv), Yu.Y. Vorona mastered modern methods of complex operations and since 1927 began to deal with the problems of transplantation of organs - testicles and kidneys (he mastered the technique of vascular suture, conducted experimental operations of free transplantation of testis (testicles), and kidney.
==Kidney Transplantation Pioneering==
April 3, 1933 in the clinic of hematology of emergency surgery and blood transfusion (Kharkov, director of the clinic Professor A.Belts) Y.Y. Voronoy for the first time in the world made a transplant of a cadaver kidney to a person. However, the thought of taking an organ from a living person Y.Y. Voronoi refused, believing that "it is impossible to inflict a deliberate disability on a healthy person, cutting out the organ necessary for transplantation for the problematic salvation of the patient." 
He decided to use a kidney from a corpse. Voronoi made this decision on the basis of many, including his own, observations. Organs from the corpse remain viable and functional for some time (especially if washed with Ringer-Locke solution) and, in addition, remain sterile. There were undoubtedly examples of Professor V.M. Shamov, who was the first in the world to make a transfusion of cadaver blood in the experiment (1928), and Professor S.S. Yudin, who successfully carried out a transfusion of such blood in the clinic (1930). It should be emphasized that before Y.Y. Voronoi, no one even tried to transplant an entire organ from a corpse using a vascular suture. 
He pioneered the transplantation of cadaver organs. On April 3, 1933, Voronoi performed the first clinical kidney transplant in the world. In the monograph of the medical historian P. Pundin it is indicated that the first kidney transplant operation was performed by Y. Voron in 1931 in Kharkov. The first documentary evidence of the case of transplantation of a cadaver kidney Y. Voronoy published in 1934 in the Italian journal "Venerva h rurg sa", where it was noted that the kidney turned on to the circulation and began to function independently (some sources incorrectly indicate the date of the operation in 1934; 1934 – the year of publication of the work of Y.Y. Voronyi). 
There is also disagreement about the location of the first kidney transplant. So I.Koroly and co-authors claim that the operation was performed in the surgical department of the Soviet hospital of Kherson, where he worked from September 1, 1931 to June 1, 1937, But at the same time Yu.Yu.Vorona was the head of the scientific support point of the All-Ukrainian Institute of Hematology of Emergency Surgery and Blood Transfusion (Kharkiv), where he performed work on the study of lymph during shock and on obtaining cytolysine. 
In this regard, working in the city of Cherson, Yu.Yu.Vorona was often on long-term business trips in the city of Kharkiv. Having studied the archival documents of the autobiography and the personnel record sheet, which are personally filled by Y.Y. Voron and printed works on the history of medicine, it can be concluded that the first transplantation of the cadaveric kidney was performed by Y.Y. Voron in the clinic of faculty surgery of the Kharkiv Medical Institute.
==Death==
Voronyy died on May 13, 1961 on the way from the October hospital home to Gorodetsky Street from a heart attack. He was buried in the Baikov cemetery of Kiev.
Category:1895 births
Category:Surgeons
Category:1961 deaths