Narbut, Vasily Mikhailovich

Very little is known about his early years of life: it is reported that he graduated from Imperial St. Petersburg University (1895) ^{[Comm 1]} and the Military Medical Academy (1900), where V. M. Bekhterev became his teacher. Together with Bekhterev, he investigated the effects of suggestions on sensitivity, and in particular on the perception of pain. Bekhterev and Narbut concluded that analgesia is a real fact ^[1] . As the best graduate, he won the Bush Prize.

In 1903 he defended his doctoral dissertation “The brain appendage and its significance for the body” and was sent abroad, where he stayed until 1906, improving in psychiatry and nervous diseases in clinics and laboratories in Europe: in Munich - with Professor Kraepelin; in Berlin - with Professor Jolly and Tsien; in Giseni - with Professor Sommer; in Paris - with Professor Maniac, Babinsky, Marie, Balle, Sonya and Mechnikov; in Edinburgh, with Professor Cluston. Upon returning from abroad, he was elected a conference by the Military Medical Academy as a clinical (ordinary) professor in the Department of Nervous and Mental Diseases and was sent to the Nikolaev Military Hospital.

In 1907, he became a professor in the Department of Neuropathology, opened by Bekhterev of the Psychoneurological Institute ; gave lectures on the pathological anatomy of the nervous system, which then, in 1914, were published by him in a separate monograph ^[2] .

In 1914 he headed the Department of Semiotics of Nervous Diseases with diagnostics at the Faculty of Medicine ^[3] .

In 1909, V. M. Narbut was appointed an advisory member of the Military Sanitary Scientific Committee; since March 22, 1915 - Inspector for the medical department of the Office of the Empress Maria . From the beginning of the 1900s, he consulted patients at the Maximilianovsk hospital ; since 1923 he headed the neurological department of the hospital ^[2] .

Since 1916, he has been a privat-docent at the Department of Philosophy of the History and Philology Faculty of St. Petersburg University; since 1918, he has been a teacher of the philosophical (later, socio-pedagogical) department of the faculty of social sciences of the university. He was briefly arrested on September 6, 1919. He taught courses in pathological psychology, on the localization and pathology of speech; September 30, 1924 was released from teaching at the University of Leningrad in connection with the liquidation of the courses he taught.

Commissioner of the People ’s Commissariat of September 17, 1924. In the 1920-1930s, he worked in the hospital. I.I. Mechnikov, at the Leningrad Institute of Organization and Labor Protection.

• Electrical excitability of muscles in newborns due to the structure of muscles and nerve fibers. Report in the scientific meeting of doctors at the Clinic of Mental and Nervous Diseases March 22, 1901 (Kazan, 1902).
• The brain appendage and its significance for the body (St. Petersburg, 1903).
• Hypnosis and its forensic medical value (Regarding Circular No. 5289 of the Medical Department, limiting the therapeutic use of hypnosis). Report at the VIII Pirogov Congress in Moscow in 1902 (St. Petersburg, 1903).
• Psychological laboratory of the Psychiatric Clinic in Giessen. (St. Petersburg, 1906).
• Pathological and anatomical changes in the central nervous system with rabies. (St. Petersburg, 1907).
• Lectures on the pathological anatomy of the nervous system. Part 1. (St. Petersburg, 1914).
• Problems of the study of personality ”(1925).
• Conditions for the development and classification of neurosis and psychoneurosis (1925).

• Narbut Vasily Mikhailovich // Biography of St. Petersburg. University.