Moisey Slonim

Moisey Ilyich Slonim was born in Tashkent in 1875. In 1893 he graduated from the Tashkent gymnasium with a gold medal and that summer entered the medical faculty of Kazan University, finishing in 1898.

Returning to Tashkent, he began as a district physician, treating malaria patients in the village of Bardankul and in the Kitatyube and Jalaltyube rural districts of Tashkent county. He then worked until 1904 as a resident physician at the Tashkent city hospital, where he had to combine the duties of an internist, neurologist, infectious-disease doctor, paediatrician and surgeon.

In 1905 he studied at the Military Medical Academy in St Petersburg under Professor N. A. Velyaminov, and in May 1906 defended a dissertation on the fine structure of the normal and pathologically altered nerve cell. The academy sent him to clinics in Berlin, Vienna and Paris, where he trained until 1907.

In the summer of 1907 he came back to Tashkent and resumed work at the city hospital, becoming known as one of the best physicians in the region. He kept abreast of new medical technology and helped his brother Solomon Slonim acquire and learn to use X-ray equipment and physiotherapy apparatus. In July 1917 he was drafted and served as a resident and then a consultant at the Tashkent district military hospital.

After a university opened in Tashkent in 1920, he and his colleagues set up its medical faculty. In December 1920 he was elected associate professor and head of the department of propaedeutics of the therapeutic clinic, and in 1921 he became a professor. He served as deputy dean in 1921–1925 and as dean of the medical faculty in 1924–1926. From 1932 he headed the hospital therapy clinic and led it to the end of his life; in 1932 he also became director of the Central Asian Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians, and in 1938–1941 served as its scientific director.

When the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR was founded in 1943, he was among its first corresponding members.

Slonim died in Tashkent in 1945 and was buried in the garden beside the old buildings of the Tashkent Medical Institute. A Tashkent street once bore his name; it was renamed Asalobod in 2011. His daughter Yudif Slonim became an astronomer and his son Yevsey an architect.