Naum Gurvich


Naum Lazarevich Gurvich was a Soviet-Jewish cardiac physician, a pioneer in the development of defibrillators.

Biography

Naum Gurvich was born in the village of Timkovichi near Minsk, Belarus.
Early successful experiments of successful defibrillation by the discharge of a capacitor performed on animals were reported by N. L. Gurvich and G. S. Yunyev in 1939. In 1947 their works were reported in western medical journals. Serial production of Gurvich's pulse defibrillator started in 1952, model ИД-1-ВЭИ. It is described in detail in Gurvich's 1957 book, Heart Fibrillation and Defibrillation.
In 1958, US senator Hubert H. Humphrey visited Nikita Khrushchev and among other things he visited the Moscow Institute of Reanimatology led by Vladimir Negovsky