The article provides information on the life and work of the prominent Russian obstetrician-gynecologist Vasily V. Preobrazhensky (1874-1944). The paper reflects years of scientists’s career from the resident physician to a renowned scholar, as well as his work as the head of obstetrics and gynecology clinics in Saint Petersburg and Arkhangelsk.

Article focuses on the role of Kazan scientists in the development and foundation of a number of departments of Arkhangelsk State Medical Institute, founded in 1932. The teaching staff for the most northern institution for higher medical education in the country was recruited from all over the Soviet Union. Founders and first heads of departments were the representatives of major scientific schools and leading universities, including the Kazan University/Kazan Medical Institute. Highly qualified specialists, scientists and healthcare managers with extensive experience played an important role in the development of healthcare in the European North of Russia. One of the first scientists of Kazan, who arrived at Arkhangelsk State Medical Institute, was psychiatrist I.N. Zhilin, whose activities are immortalized in the history of the department and the psychiatric hospital. Next Kazan representative, A.I. Labbok - anatomist, surgeon, doctor of sciences, professor, founder and first head of the department of operative surgery and topographic anatomy of the Institute. Surgeon A.A. Vechtomov became a professor and head of the Department of General Surgery, the head of the clinic, where during the Great Patriotic War the wounded from the Karelian Front and the Northern Fleet were treated. The founder of the Department of Pediatrics at Arkhangelsk State Medical Institute - Professor Yu.V. Makarov, came to Arkhangelsk from Kazan and his wife, G.A. Khayn-Makarova, who contributed much to military pediatrics. They were succeeded by associate professor A.G. Suvorov, who raised a galaxy of eminent pediatricians. Research of the data on many of Kazan scientists are still ongoing at the museum complex of the Northern State Medical University.

Notable an obstetrician-gynecologist, urologist, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor Alexander Mazhbits made a great contribution to the history of medicine of the USSR and the annals of the Arkhangelsk state medical Institute (ASMI, now the North-State Medical University (NSMU)), where he headed the Department in 1953-1958. Being the author of over 120 scientific works and 7 books, many scientific inventions and publications on obstetric and gynecological urology and its history, he was a creator of the textbook Operative urogynecology, inventor and prominent scientist. Each operation for a particular urogynecological disease the author described in detail and step by step with the attachment of original visual drawings, photos or radiographs, diagrams of practical activities. Alexander Moiseevich was the first who proposed a new direction for the creation of urogynecology. Not specific urologists, surgeons or obstetricians-gynecologists should deal with this activities, but urogynecologists who consider the female pelvis as a whole. A.M. Mazhbits wrote: Obstetrics-gynecology and female urology are daughter cells of general pelvic surgery, they are twins of different ages, so closely related to each other genetically, clinically and practically that the boundaries between them are often smoothed out.