Hamaliia, Mykola

Hamaliia, Mykola [Гамалія, Микола; Hamalija], b 17 February 1859 in Odesa, d 29 March 1949 in Moscow. Microbiologist and epidemiologist; from 1940 honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and from 1945 full member of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. A graduate of Odesa University (1880) and the Saint Petersburg Military Medical Academy (1883), he worked briefly in 1886 under Louis Pasteur in Paris. Later that year in Odesa Hamaliia founded, with Illia Mechnikov, the first bacteriological station in the Russian Empire and performed the first rabies vaccinations. The succeeding years were devoted to research on rabies, tuberculosis, cholera, and cattle plague. He was a founder of the Odesa Bacteriological Institute and served as its director (1899–1908). In 1901–2 he combated the plague in Odesa, and then cholera in Transcaucasia, the Volga region, and the Donets Basin. Hamaliia founded and edited (1910–13) Gigiena i sanitariia, the first journal of its kind in the Russian Empire. Then he served as director of the Vaccination Institute in Leningrad (1912–28) and of the Central Institute of Epidemiology and Bacteriology (1930–8), as chairman of the microbiology department of the Second Moscow Medical Institute (1938–49), and as honorary president of the All-Union Society of Microbiologists, Epidemiologists, and Infectionists (1939–49), which he founded. In his final years he headed a laboratory at the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. Hamaliia wrote over 300 scientific works on rabies, the plague, cholera, smallpox, and other infectious diseases, and made a number of important discoveries. His collected works were published posthumously.

Mark Adams

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]