On March 11, a postage stamp dedicated to the 150th Birth Anniversary of Nikolai Burdenko, a surgeon, a healthcare organizer, and the founder of neurosurgery was put into postal circulation

Nikolai Burdenko (1876–1946) was a Chief Surgeon of the Red Army, an Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, a Colonel General of the Medical Service.

With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Nikolai Burdenko volunteered for the military medical corps, participated in hostilities in Manchuria. He graduated from Yuryev University in 1906. From 1907, he worked as a surgeon at the Penza Provincial Hospital. From 1910, he was a professor in the Department of Operative Surgery and Topographic Anatomy of Yuryev University.

At the beginning of the First World War, he of his own accord gained an appointment to the active army. He was engaged in the organization of military sanitary detachments, hospitals and clearing stations. He operated a lot in field and army hospitals.

In March of 1917, Nikolai Burdenko was appointed acting chief military medical inspector of the Russian army, and in May, chief field military medical inspector. From 1923, he was a professor at the medical faculty of Moscow University, where he headed a surgical clinic of the faculty, presently named after him, until the end of his life. From 1929, N. Burdenko was the Director of the neurosurgical clinic at the Röntgen Institute of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR.

N. Burdenko made a great contribution to the study of processes occurring in the central and peripheral nervous system resulting from surgical intervention, due to acute injuries, and he developed bulbotomy, an operation in the upper section of the spinal cord. N. Burdenko made a real revolution in the treatment of brain tumors. The professor has developed simpler methods for carrying out such operations and thus made them widespread. In addition, he proposed a number of original operations that had never been performed before. Since 1929, he was Chairman of the Moscow Surgical Society.

In 1937, he was appointed Chief Consultant Surgeon at the Military Medical Administration of the Red Army. In 1939, the academician went to the front of the Soviet-Finnish war, where he spent the entire period of hostilities. It was based on the experience of this war that N. Burdenko developed an advanced for that time statute on military field surgery, which was implemented and successfully applied in the Great Patriotic War.

On August 1 of 1941, N. Burdenko was drafted into the Red Army and appointed Chief Surgeon. He spent a lot of time at the front, personally performed thousands of complex operations. He created the doctrine of the battle wound. At the head of a team of doctors, he personally tested new drugs — streptocide, sulfidine, penicillin - in frontline hispitals.

The name of N. Burdenko is borne by the Research Institute of Neurosurgery in Moscow, the Main Military Hospital of the Ministry of Defense, and other medical institutions in Russia.

The postage stamp provides a portrait of Nikolai Burdenko against the backdrop of a photograph from the operating room.

In addition to the issue of the postage stamp, JSC Marka produced First Day Covers and special cancels for Moscow, St. Petersburg, Penza and Saki of the Republic of Crimea.


Design Artist: Kh. Betredinova.
Face value: 80 rubles.
Stamp size: 37×37 mm, sheet size: 131×137 mm.
Emission form: a sheet with formatted margins with 9 (3×3) stamps.
Quantity: 85.5 thousand stamps (9.5 thousand sheets).

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