Magilnitsky (Magilnitzky) Solomon Girshevich (also Alexander Grigorievich)
(13.09.1903, Riga — 17.04.1990) — ophthalmologist and surgeon, Candidate of Medical Sciences, outstanding historian of medicine, and writer.
Solomon Magilnitsky was born into the family of an antiquarian. He completed secondary school in Riga and studied in Germany (Jena, Hamburg) and Austria (Vienna). In 1929 he graduated from the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna with a specialisation in ophthalmology. In 1932 he returned to Latvia, obtained a Latvian medical diploma, and began working at the clinic of Professor I. Yu. Rupert at the 1st Riga City Hospital.
From the 1920s he published poetry, which appeared in Berlin and Riga. He was active in public and journalistic life. He was the publisher and responsible editor of the anti-fascist journal Nord-Ost (1931–1932), and published journalistic articles, literary criticism, and music reviews. In 1932, together with a group of leading Latvian writers and public figures, he signed an appeal against war.
In 1936–1937 he completed a clinical residency in Moscow at the Helmholtz Institute of Eye Diseases. After returning to Latvia, he lived and worked in Riga and Daugavpils, where in 1940–1941 he headed the ophthalmology department of the hospital and the city health department.
During the Second World War he served as a physician in the medical battalion of the 201st Rifle Division and as head of the ophthalmology and surgical departments in evacuation hospitals. From 1944 to 1980 he worked in the ophthalmology department of the 1st Riga City Hospital, serving as head of the department from 1948 to 1970. From 1966 to 1970 he was the chief ophthalmologist of Riga.
In 1932 Solomon Magilnitsky became a member of the Latvian Scientific Ophthalmological Society, and from 1965 to 1968 he served as its chairman. In 1953 he, together with his wife and several other representatives of the Riga Jewish intelligentsia, was arrested in connection with the so-called “Doctors’ Plot”; he was released later that same year.
He published articles in medical journals on the treatment of cataracts and on surgery for malignant diseases of the eye. From the 1960s he devoted himself to the history of ophthalmology. He took part in the creation of a multi-volume handbook on eye diseases, for which he wrote An Essay on the History of Ophthalmology (1962). In 1963 this work was defended as a Candidate of Medical Sciences dissertation. He published articles in the journal Vestnik oftalmologii and in the collections From the History of Medicine (Riga). In total he authored 130 scholarly works, 80 of them devoted to the history of ophthalmology, including the study Shakespeare on the Eyes and Vision (1995).
Solomon Magilnitsky was fluent in several languages, an outstanding connoisseur of classical music and literature, and a passionate bibliophile.
A. Teitelbaum
Selected work:
Shakespeare on the Eyes and Vision (Шекспир о глазах и зрении). Moscow, 1995