Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is a princess, professor, physician, and poet. She is Lithuanian princess and surgeon, Vera Ignatievna Giedroyc.

Princess Vera Ignatievna Giedroyc was born in Kiev on April 7 1876, into Lithuanian royalty, and was raised in the Russia empire. She trained to be a surgeon at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). The failing health of parents and death of her sister forced her to abandon her training and return back to Russia in 1900. She completed her training is Russia.

Giedroyc specialized in surgery for women, and then went on to become one of the first women-professors of surgery in the world. She soon branched into other areas of surgery and medicine. Her work in laparotomies during the Russo-Japanese War, was among the first to achieve a high success rate. Her success with the procedure lead to the Russian army to adopt it and make it the standard of treatment for penetrating abdominal wounds.

In 1909 she was transferred to the court hospital in Tsarskoe Selo, (near today's St. Petersburg) where she worked as a surgeon to the Russian imperial family. During her practice in Tsarskoe Sole, she joined the Poets' Guild, and began publishing her poems under the pen name "Sergei Giedroyc".

After the February Revolution in 1917, the first of two revolutions in Russia in that year, (It resulted in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the collapse of Imperial Russia.) she remained at Tsarskoe Selo, while many of her relatives fled during the turbulent time of political unrest. Giedroyc return to her work with the military, going to work on the World War I front. After the war she settled in Kiev with her lover, The Countess Maria Nierodt.

She remained active in her work in medicine, writing scientific papers on Oncology, Pediatric Surgery, and Endocrinology. In 1921 she began teaching at the Kiev Medical Institute, receiving full professorship in the Department of Surgery, in 1923. In 1930 Giedroyc was name the chair of Department of Surgery, the first woman in the world to do so. She held that post for the 2 remaining years of her life, before passing away from cancer.