The First St. Petersburg State Medical University, Russia

PSPbGMU them. acad. I.P. Pavlova originates from the opening on September 14 (26), 1897, of the Women’s Medical Institute (ZHMI), the first educational institution in Russia and in Europe, in which women were given the opportunity to obtain a higher medical education.

Soon after the opening of the Women’s Medical Institute becomes a universally recognized and authoritative example of the organization of higher medical education and science. Clinics and departments of GMS became the centers of development and introduction into medical practice of the most advanced methods of diagnostics and treatment.

In the 1930s, of the 1 LMI, the Chemical-Pharmaceutical and Pediatric Institutes were separated into independent universities. At the same time, a project for the construction of new buildings and laboratories was developed. However, the Great Patriotic War prevented the implementation of these plans.

During the heroic defense of Leningrad, the Institute did not stop pedagogical, medical and scientific work, its graduates fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. We honor the names of the dead. In 1985, in the park of the institute, on the spot where the unexploded bomb lay, a monument to the dead doctors was erected.

The basis of the financial foundation of the institute was the capital of the family of Lydia Alekseevna Shanyavskaya, a prominent participant in the social movement for the equality of women. A huge, disinterested help was rendered by the graduate of ZMI, a representative of the famous Nobel family – Marta Ludwigovna Nobel-Oleinikova.

In 1908 in the faculty surgery clinic, built on the means of the Nobel family, Professor M.I. Nemenov discovered one of the first X-ray rooms in Russia. Ten years later, in 1918, the first in Europe State Radiological, Radiological and Cancer Institute was organized.

In 1916 the young men began to enter the institute. The Institute Council was granted the right to award academic degrees to male doctors.

The outstanding female scientists worked at the Institute: Anna Akimovna Sakhnovskaya, the world’s first woman professor of medicine; headed the Department of Skin and Venereal Diseases. Olga Podvysotskaya, who later became the first woman academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the Russian Federation (since 1944) and the first woman to be a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (since 1939), continued her scientific activity in dermatovenereology.

In 1967, the first in the USSR Scientific Research Institute of Pulmonology was organized.

PSPbGMU them. acad. IP Pavlova is the only university in the city that has a polyclinic in its structure: in 2010, from the day of its foundation, it turned 175 years old.

Scientific activity has always been one of the top priorities of University; research embraces the main medical fields, including oncology, pharmacology, hematology and transplantation, molecular genetics, cardiology and cardiac surgery, pulmonology, nephrology, etc.