Dr. E.N. Korenev

The biography of one of the first graduates of the Faculty of Medicine of the Imperial Tomsk University Evgeny Korenev was reconstructed. In 1903 he defended his doctoral thesis in medicine on the basis of the material on the sanitary living and working conditions of workers of the Lena goldfields which he collected during his work as a doctor at the mines of the Bodaibo company. E.N. Korenev was a pediatrician in the Soviet time, he survived the blockade of Leningrad. His thesis can be divided into four parts. The first one describes the terrain and climate, and the methods of mining gold. The second part includes two sections devoted to employment, the labor team and employees. The third part of the thesis is devoted to the living and working conditions of workers and employees: the living quarters; the service system at the mines: bakeries, a kvass factory, workshops, latrines, baths, taverns, alimentary allowance; the working day, the day of rest, wages and penalties; miners; schools. The fourth part of the work is an extensive essay on the state of health care at the mines. E.N. Korenev gave an evaluation of the hygienic living conditions of the population at the mines not from the subjective indications of the workers, employees and employers, but from the criteria of medical science of his time. For five years of work in the Lena district he collected the statistics for 10 years of the structure of the workers, measured nearly three hundred living quarters at the mines, measured light, temperature, carbon dioxide, collected information on the quantity and quality of food, the issuance of wine servings, conducted a comparative analysis of the calorie content, collected statistics on the earnings of workers. E.N. Korenev analyzed the statistics of diseases in the mines of the largest companies Lenzoloto, Bodaibo and in the industry in different parts of Siberia, in hospitals at the mines where laid-off workers lived in 1897 - the first half of the 1900s. The main illnesses were injuries, gastrointestinal, respiratory diseases, scurvy and rheumatism. The workers tried not to get into hospital. In the reality there were many more sick people than statistics in the mine hospitals shows. The actual level of injury was ten times higher than it was registered by the mining inspectorate [2. Pp. 228-256]. E.N. Korenev unequivocally concludes that the conditions of life at the mines did not meet the requirements of health and medical care, and living conditions and working conditions had a pernicious effect on the health of workers. This dissertation is still the best in its reliability and completeness of work on the history of industrial labor in Siberia at the end of the 19th - early 20th centuries.

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