Section 02: The Surgeon

This section treats St. Luke as what he never ceased to be even as a bishop in exile: a working surgeon of the first rank. The two files cover, first, his great treatise Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections (Ocherki gnoynoy khirurgii) — the book conceived in his provincial years, written and rewritten across decades of arrest and exile, signed at last with his episcopal name, and crowned in 1946 with the Stalin Prize; and, second, the conviction that ran beneath the whole of his medical life: medicine not as a profession set against the priesthood but as itself a vocation, a service to the suffering Christ in the suffering patient, which he refused to abandon even when ordered to choose between the scalpel and the cross.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / New Martyrs and Confessors (canonized 2000)

Contents

File Topic
Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections The premonition of the bishop’s name on the title page; what “purulent surgery” meant before antibiotics; the first edition of 1934 and the expanded 1946 edition; the book’s standing as a reference work for generations of Soviet surgeons
Medicine as Vocation The renunciation of art for “what is useful for suffering people” as the root of a theology of medicine; the patient as the suffering Christ; the refusal to abandon surgery, blessed by Patriarch Tikhon; the eponymous surgical techniques and the standing of the work

How to Use

  • Read Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections for the central medical achievement — the book itself, its subject, and its place in the history of Soviet surgery.
  • Read Medicine as Vocation for the inner logic that made a surgeon of a would-be artist and kept a bishop at the operating table through three exiles.
  • The wartime surgery and the Stalin Prize that crowned this work are treated in Section 06; the operating done under exile in Section 05.

Cross-References