The exposition of the Great Fatherland War gunshot wounds anatomical preparations as a learning and material base for military doctors training

In the initial period of the Great fatherland war, one of the reasons for significant sanitary losses was the insufficient staffing of army units with experienced military medical specialists. Civilian doctors urgently mobilized in the first days of the war did not have sufficient knowledge in the field of military field surgery. There was a need to generalize the experience acquired by military doctors when providing assistance at the stages of medical evacuation, as well as by military field surgeons who performed surgical interventions in medical battalions and hospitals. To study the morphology of gunshot wounds of various parts of the body and organs, it was necessary to create an equipped educational and material base, including preparations with wounds of almost all parts of the body and organs. To study them, by order of the main military sanitary department of the army, mobile pathological anatomical laboratories were created, whose employees collected and documented a large collection of pathological anatomical preparations, which were transferred to the Military Medical Museum in St. Petersburg. After the end of the war, for several decades, a significant part of the exhibits lost their demonstration qualities, and some exhibits fell into disrepair. In 1988, thanks to the efforts of Professor Ivan Guyvoronsky, these exhibits were transferred to the Department of Normal Anatomy of the Kirov Military Medical Academy, where under the guidance of Professor Pavel Pashchenko were restored using a specially developed method. The essence of the method consisted in several sequential stages of drug recovery. At the first stage, mechanical manual cleaning of the preparations from mold was carried out, removing decayed and torn fragments and giving it the proper form for display. At the next stage, thorough washing was carried out, followed by bleaching of the preparations in solutions of hydrogen peroxide of various concentrations and special solutions. By 1990, a special “Exhibition of gunshot wounds” was created, which is part of the fundamental anatomical museum of the department. Currently, the materials from this exhibition are used as unique visual material in the process of training and educating military doctors.