Leontovych, Oleksander

Leontovych, Oleksander [Леонтович, Олександер; Leontovyč], b 11 November 1869 in Kyiv, d 15 December 1943 in Moscow. Physiologist and neurohistologist; full member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) from 1929. He graduated from Kyiv University in 1893 and wrote his doctoral thesis on the double innervation of human skin in 1900. He was a teacher at the agriculture department of the Kyiv Polytechnical Institute (1898–1912), a professor of animal physiology at the Moscow Agricultural Institute (from 1923), and director of the physiology division at the Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (from 1936). He wrote nearly 80 works on the physiology and histology of the peripheral nervous system, proposed a theory of the neuron as an alternating current transmitter (1928–39), researched the physiological regeneration of the nervous system, and perfected a method of staining nervous tissue. A monograph on him was written by N. Bodrova and B. Kraiukhin (1950).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]