Devoted to Science: Personal Tragedy and Great Discoveries of Academician Bekhterev's Granddaughter

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

It is difficult to overestimate the merits of Academician Vladimir Bekhterev: many important discoveries have been made by his efforts in the field of psychiatry. The granddaughter became the successor to the work of the great scientist - Natalia Bekhtereva … Many trials fell to her lot: childhood in an orphanage with the stigma of the daughter of an enemy of the people, famine in besieged Leningrad … However, she survived and directed all her efforts to the development of national science.

Natalia Bekhtereva lived a hard life: her selfless childhood ended in an instant, when in 1937 she was arrested and sentenced to death, and her mother was sent into exile in the camps. Then the 13-year-old girl ended up in a boarding school, since none of the relatives dared to take the daughter of an enemy of the people for education. Natalia studied diligently, and after graduation she was able to apply to eight institutes in Leningrad. She did not think about a medical career, but fate left her no choice: after the evacuation of universities in connection with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, only the medical institute remained to work in the city. This is where Natalya Bekhtereva entered.

The study was exciting. Despite the terrible living conditions, hunger and poverty of the besieged Leningrad, Natalya was able to devote herself to science and decided on a dissertation research. The young scientist was interested in everything related to the activity of the brain, and she was incredibly happy about the opportunity to take part in laboratory research.

At the dawn of the study of the specifics of the brain, scientists performed primitive experiments in order to master basic knowledge of how the human brain works. During the operation, the patient was awake, and doctors passed electrodes through individual parts of the brain. The reaction of the "experimental" testified to what kind of activity a particular part of the brain was responsible for, most often there were problems with the pronunciation of words, or the patient described the hallucinations he saw. Gradually, Bekhtereva headed this direction, she owns a lot of scientific research on how the human brain works, what is the nature of thinking, what mechanisms are involved in memorization.

Natalia conquered many career heights: at first she headed a scientific laboratory, then became an academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. Despite her selfless service to science, Bekhtereva not only found like-minded people, but also made many enemies. Out of envy, they scribbled anonymous letters at her, remembered the past, branded her with her father. She went through the hardest trials in the 1990s: then she lost her husband (the cause was death after a stroke) and her adopted child, who committed suicide. Until the end of her life, Natalya Bekhtereva was engaged in science, comparing scientific research with the search for pearls. The researcher was convinced that there was still a lot of unknown in the activity of the brain, believed in prophetic dreams and did not recognize clinical death, respected Wanga's predictions and argued that society in its development follows the same mechanisms that are inherent in the work of the brain.

Natalia Bekhtereva is a world-renowned scientist. Her activities are a vivid example of what results can be achieved woman in science.