With today’s Google Doodle, the tech giant celebrates the 151st birthday of a Russian surgeon, professor, poet, and author Dr. Vera Gedroits. For the unaware, Dr. Gedroits is the country’s first female military surgeon and also one of the world’s first female professors of surgery.
Celebrating the birth anniversary of Dr. Gedroits, Google states, “Thank you, Vera Gedroits, for pushing the world of medicine forward, even with the odds stacked against you.”
In an official statement, Google states, “When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, Dr. Gedroits volunteered as a surgeon on a Red Cross hospital train.”
“Under threat of enemy fire, she performed complex abdominal operations in a converted railway car with such unprecedented success that her technique was adopted as the new standard by the Russian government. Following her battlefield service, Dr. Gedroits worked as a surgeon for the Russian royal family before her return home to Kiev, where she was appointed professor of surgery at the University of Kiev in 1929,” the tech giant further notes.
For the unaware, Dr Gedroits was born in the year 1870 into a family of Lithuanian royal descent in Kiev, which was then a part of the Russian Empire. She later left Russia to study medicine in Switzerland in her teenage. She returned home in the 20th century where she began her medical career as a surgeon at a factory hospital.
