Girshman, Leonard

Born Mar. 13 (25), 1839, in Tukums, in the present-day Latvian SSR; died Jan. 3, 1921, in Kharkov. Russian physician and ophthalmologist.

Girshman graduated from the medical school at the University of Kharkov in 1860. In 1895 he became a professor in the university’s subdepartment for the study of eye diseases, which he himself had organized. In 1905 he left the university as a protest against the rector’s expulsion of students after some student demonstrations. From 1908 he worked in the Kharkov Hospital for Eye Diseases. His most important writings deal with the physiology of color perception, the embryology of vessels in the retina, and the treatment of trachoma. Girshman personally attended nearly 1 million patients. He was the founder of a school for ophthalmologists. The Ukrainian Institute for the Scientific Research of Eye Diseases, which is located in Kharkov, is named after him.