Turning the pages back... June 18, 1905 (06/13/99)

Turning the pages back...

June 18, 1905

Levko Medved was a pioneer in the field of occupational hygiene - the science of identifying and preventing hazards in the workplace. He was also one of the few who actually benefitted from living in the hellish conditions of Stalin's Soviet Union, and yet can be considered a positive figure. Medved stands as one of the paradoxes that allows for dramatic medical advances in times of crisis.

Medved was born on June 18, 1905, into a poor peasant's family in the village of Chorna Hreblia in Olhopil county in Podilia, about 100 miles south of Vinnytsia. In his youth he worked in a sugar refining factory, but also studied and was accepted to the Vinnytsia Pharmaceutical Institute, graduating in 1927.

Doubtless his path to Kyiv was speeded thanks to Ukrainization and the massive movement of people from the countryside to the cities. He graduated from the Kyiv Medical Institute (KMI) in 1939. The regime had an obvious bias in favor of a person of Medved's specialization and interests. Furthermore, massive purges swept through the USSR's medical profession. This confluence of circumstances resulted in his appointment as director of the KMI two years later.

As the Nazi-Soviet war raged, in 1944 Medved founded the department of occupational hygiene at the KMI and served as its director until 1951. A leading figure in helping Soviet Ukraine recover from the conflict, he was appointed deputy minister of health in 1947 and minister shortly thereafter, serving until 1952

In 1952, he left the ministry to found and assume the directorship of the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Occupational Hygiene and Disease, a post he held until 1964. That year he was appointed director of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of the Hygiene and Toxicology of Pesticides, Polymers and Plastics.

Medved organized a wide range of research through his students and colleagues at the institutes he directed, helped set occupational health standards in the USSR's agricultural sector and in industry, and established scientific grounding for legislation regulating occupational hygiene in agriculture.

Medved was an internationally acknowledged expert on the health effects of pesticides, and introduced a hygienic system of classification of pesticides that was accepted in the USSR and abroad. He wrote over 250 works on agricultural and industrial hygiene, and pesticide toxicology, as well as a history of Soviet health care.

Levko Medved died in Kyiv on Feburary 22, 1982.

Source: "Medved, Levko," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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