Zabolotny, Danylo

Zabolotny, Danylo [Заболотний, Данило; Zabolotnyj], b 28 December 1866 in Chobotarka (now Zabolotne), Olhopil county, Podilia gubernia, d 15 December 1929 in Kyiv. Microbiologist and epidemiologist; full member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) from 1922 and its president in 1928–9; full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1929. A graduate in physics and mathematics of Odesa University (1891) and in medicine of Kyiv University (1894), he was the founding director of the first bacteriology department in the Russian Empire, at the Saint Petersburg Women’s Medical Institute (1898–1928), and of the first epidemiology department in the world, at Odesa University (1920). He was rector of the Odesa Medical Institute (1921–4), taught at the Leningrad Military Medical Academy (1924–8), and founded and directed the Institute of Microbiology and Virology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1928). Zabolotny achieved important results in his research on plague, cholera, syphilis, gangrene, diphtheria, typhus, and dysentery; he conducted expeditions to India, Mongolia, and China to study the plague. He discovered (with Ivan Savchenko) bacilli-carrying and vibrio cholera (1893), and proved (1911) that the bacteria causing plague are transmitted to humans by wild rodents. A cofounder of the International Society of Microbiologists, Zabolotny wrote Osnovy epidemiologii (Fundamentals of Epidemiology, vol 1, 1927). Compilations of his studies were published as Izbrannye trudy (Collected Works, 2 vols, 1956–7) and Vybrani pratsi (Selected Works, 1969). Biographies of him have been written by H. Golubev (1962), Vira Bilai (1966), and Ye. Kryzhanivsky (1971), and there is a museum in his honor in Zabolotne, where he is buried.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]