A Brilliant Career. A Fatal Error.

When doctors err, it is typically the patient who suffers. The blunder made by Dr. Vladimir Bekhterev, however, put no one else but the doctor himself in danger. And shortly thereafter, eerie circumstances saw the end of his immensely successful life, which began in a village in Tatarstan on January 20, 1857.

When Bekhterev was nine years old, his father succumbed to tuberculosis. Though his father’s early death made life more difficult for the boy, his mother and two brothers, Bekhterev was in little need of paternal discipline. Bookish and diligent from an early age, he also showed a precocious interest in science.

At 16, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he enrolled at the Imperial Medical and Surgical Academy (now called the S.M. Kirov Military Medical Academy). According to Elena Bozhkova (writing in a recent issue of The Lancet Neurology journal), shortly into his college tenure, Bekhterev, suffering from emotional distress, checked himself into a local clinic for four weeks. Bozhkova adds that one of Bekhterev’s Russian biographers concluded that this period in the clinic sparked the budding scientist’s longstanding interest in neuropathology.