Ludvig Puusepp

Puusepp married Maria Kotšubei in 1906. Together they left the Soviet Union in 1920, feeling it was becoming an unsafe place for scientists. His wife died of tuberculosis in 1929.

He later married Maria Küppar. Their first and only child Liivia was born in 1932. She also became a neurosurgeon.

Diagnosed with a carcinoma of the stomach, he died in 1942 and is buried in Tartu, Estonia at the Raadi cemetery.

Born in Kiev to an Estonian father and Polish-Czech mother on December 3, 1875, Puusepp was raised in a working-class family. His father was a shoemaker.

At the age of eight, he earned a place in the German School, where he completed three years of study in two years, despite being one of the youngest students.

Earning a scholarship for an elite secondary school, he supplemented his family’s income through tutoring when his father became too ill to work. He still graduated with high honors.

He attended the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy from 1894 to 1899.

He trained with the renowned Russian neurologist Professor Vladimir Bechterew while in medical school. Under Bechterew’s tutelage, he developed an appreciation for the weaknesses in modern surgeries involving the nervous system. In 1899, he completed his first neurological surgery.

After his graduation from medical school, Puusepp taught in a school affiliated with the Baltic Shipyards. In 1900, they sent him to Vienna, Paris, Berlin, London, and Copenhagen to learn light therapy techniques. He became a vocal and active member of several European medical societies during this period.

In 1902, he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Cerebral Centers Governing the Erection and Ejaculation of the Penis.” Many of his early publications deal with sexual function and malfunction as well as the effects and causes of alcoholism.

He became a senior physician for the Russian Red Cross Flying Squad during the Ruso-Japanese War of 1904-1905, supervising the care of as many as 600 wounded at a time. He developed a cart for transporting three wounded men at a time and earned multiple medals from the military and Red Cross.

He traveled to the United States in 1909 to learn about women’s medical education. He wrote to acquaintances he now believed women could work as well as men in medicine and science.

In 1910, he became the world’s first professor of neurosurgery at St. Petersburg’s Institute of Psychoneurology.

Puusepp’s 1916 paper Травматический невроз военного времени (“Traumatic War Neurosis”) was among the earliest scientific research into the diagnosis and treatment of neurological injuries received in combat.

His 1929 textbook, Die Tumoren des Gehirns (Brain Tumours), was a central text for understanding brain tumors for decades.

Between 1932 and 1939, he completed a two-and-a-half volume textbook Die chirurgische Neuropathologie (Surgical Neuropathology) that remains a reference today and included the first detailed description of how to treat compressed intervertebral discs through surgery.