Tatyana Ilina

Tatyana Georgievna Ilina was born on 26 June 1920 in Tashkent. In 1942 she graduated from the Tashkent Medical Institute — founded in 1935 on the basis of the medical faculty of the Central Asian University — and stayed to work in its eye department, first as a resident, then as an assistant, associate professor and professor.

During the war years Ilina trained under the ophthalmologist Vladimir Filatov, whose Institute of Eye Diseases and Tissue Therapy had been evacuated to Tashkent. For many years, alongside her clinical and teaching work, she took part in the fight against trachoma in the republic, finding and treating patients.

In 1956 Ilina defended her candidate’s dissertation, “The blind spot in patients with brucellosis”. Her main subject then became glaucoma: early diagnosis, prevention and treatment. With her involvement, specialised glaucoma offices were opened in every region of Uzbekistan (the sources give their number as seventeen).

She devoted a separate study to the course of glaucoma in people who had lived for more than six months under the stress of the strong Tashkent earthquake of 1966. Her doctoral dissertation, “Dispensary care of glaucoma patients in Uzbekistan and some questions of its pathogenesis”, was defended in 1971.

From 1976, when two eye-disease departments were set up at the Tashkent State Medical Institute, Ilina headed one of them — for more than seventeen years, according to the department. She published at least 120 scientific papers, trained at least sixteen candidates of sciences and, as a surgeon, developed methods of plastic surgery of the eye and operations for cataract, glaucoma and retinal detachment.

Ilina served as deputy chairman of the Scientific Society of Ophthalmologists of Uzbekistan and for eleven years as chief freelance ophthalmologist of the republic’s Ministry of Health. She held the honorary titles of Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR and Honoured Healthcare Worker. Tatyana Ilina died in 2003.