Our Notes & References

Very rare illustrated Tbilisi publication on the health condition of the youth of Georgia, then part of the Russian empire: with a wealth of fascinating figures and statistics, and more than 40 illustrations showing Georgian types as well as many body diseases.

Doctor Pantiukhov is here primarly concerned with the young Georgian people meant to go to military service: their physical qualities, health, illnesses, death causes and rate. In parallel he gives an extensive statistics on natality, marriages and mortality in Georgia in general, and analyses the illnesses and death causes in the main hospital of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, distinguishing in particular the various nationalities of the patients.

Finally and most strikingly, Pantiukhov comments skin and body illnesses affecting local inhabitants, richly illustrated by photographs. Some of these photographs, he writes, were taken by him, the others by the Mikhailovskii hospital of Tbilisi. The opening of the work shows the same attention to precision and information, as it begins with a list of sources used by the author.

Ivan Pantiukhov (1836-1911) was a military physician, anthropologist and a publicist. After studying medicine in Kiev, Pantiukhov was sent to the Caucasus as a military doctor in 1862. In parallel to his military activity there, he published scientific articles on medical and anthropological topics. He was badly wounded in 1864 and was forced to leave military service. He worked then in different military hospitals in various parts of the Russian empire and actively contributed to the scientific developments in the country. He was the father of Oleg Pantiukhov, the founder of the Russian Association of Scouts.

The title and the table of contents are in Russian and French; the rest, ie. the whole text and the plates captions, is in Russian. Includes at end a chronological list of Pantiukhov’s publications, focusing on health issues and the Caucasus.

Extremely rare as we could trace only one example in Worldcat (NYPL, but possibly incomplete with fewer pages?), and apparently no copy in the two main libraries of Russia, the NLR in St. Petersburg and the RSL in Moscow. We could not trace any copy at auction, including Russia.