Vosit Vohidov

Vosit Vohidov was born on 13 December 1917 into a peasant family in the village of Chaga near the town of Turkestan (today in southern Kazakhstan). His father, Abduvohid Xolmetov, had nine children, two of whom died young; the youngest, Vosit, like his siblings, helped his parents on the farm.

He graduated from the Tashkent Medical Institute (now the Tashkent Medical Academy) in 1939. In 1950 he defended a candidate’s dissertation on the function of the pancreas in purulent diseases, and in 1962 a doctoral dissertation on pleural adhesions and the role of their vessels in the pulmonary circulation. He became a Doctor of Medical Sciences and a professor; in 1963–1975 he headed the institute’s department of general surgery, and from 1975 its department of hospital surgery.

Vohidov was among the first in Uzbekistan to bring operations on the heart, lungs, blood vessels and oesophagus into clinical practice. His research dealt with improving the diagnosis and surgical treatment of diseases of the chest and abdominal organs and of the heart and vessels.

In 1973 a decree of the USSR Council of Ministers and an order of the health minister created the Tashkent branch of the All-Union Research Institute of Clinical and Experimental Surgery. Vohidov headed it and remained its director to the end of his life; the institution later became the Tashkent surgery research centre.

He wrote more than 180 scientific works and trained 15 doctors and 60 candidates of science. From 1971 he was a full member of the World Association of Surgeons, in 1979–1992 he was editor-in-chief of the Medical Journal of Uzbekistan, and he sat on the editorial board of the journal “Khirurgiya” named after Pirogov.

In 1967 Vohidov received the title of Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1979 he was elected an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR; he held the Orders of Lenin, of the October Revolution and of the Badge of Honour. He died in Tashkent on 1 June 1994. By a Cabinet of Ministers decision of 6 July 1995 the surgery centre was named after him, a street in Tashkent also bears his name, and in 2003 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit”.