1910. 8vo, pp. 294; with 60 text engravings, a number partially coloured in red; lightly browned throughout due to paper quality, with occasional minor foxing, gutter cracked at p. 3; with old library stamp at head of title-page; in contemporary black morocco over marbled boards, spine with white printed paper label, label a little darkened with some light edge-wear and nicking, covers a little scuffed and scratched, with minor loss on rear cover, extremities bumped and lightly worn; a good copy. Second revised and expanded edition, first published in Moscow in 1901 of this ‘beginner’s guide’, considered to be the first independent Russian attempt to provide a detailed summary of the most convenient methods of autopsy, the work of the noted pathologist Mikhail Mikhailovich Pokrovsky (1863-1920), founder of the pathology department in Tomsk University, and considered one of the pre-eminent medical professors of his day, and in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Chapters also highlight the important body changes likely to be encountered on corpses due to disease.
Mikhail Pokrovsky graduated from the Military Medical Academy in 1888, going on to work for nearly ten years at the Imperial Moscow University, when he became assistant professor in 1898. The first edition of the present work was published in 1901 whilst still in Moscow, the year before he moved to the position of dissector at the St. Petersburg Women’s Medical Institute. He remained there for six years, becoming a State Councillor. In 1908 he was elected an extraordinary professor at the Department of Pathological Anatomy and Pathological Histology, part of the Imperial Tomsk University, subsequently becoming Professor, and he was to remain in charge of the Tomsk department throughout the First World War and the October Revolution. In addition to the present work he is remembered for his 1916 general text book of pathology ‘Principles of Pathology’. In 1920 he moved to Nizhny Novgorod, where he was a professor in the Department of General Pathology until his death in the following year.