Dr. Vladimir (Zeev Wolf) Mintz

Vladimir Mintz graduated from Tartu University in Estonia in 1895 and spent a year training as a physician in Germany. He then worked at the surgery clinics of Moscow University Hospital, and during World War I was head of the surgery department of Moscow’s main hospital. Mintz became a professor at Moscow University in 1917 and headed the city’s clinics between 1918 and 1920. In 1918, he operated successfully on Lenin after the attempt on the latter’s life by Fannie Kaplan. With Lenin’s aid, Mintz was permitted to return to Riga in 1920, where from 1924 he was in charge of the surgical department of the Jewish hospital, Bikur-Holim. In 1940–1941, he directed the surgery department at the Latvian State University’s clinics.

As a founder of the modern Russian and Latvian schools of surgery, Mintz published more than 100 articles and books on neurosurgery, plastic surgery, orthopedics, gynecology, urology, and oncology. After the Nazi invasion, in 1941–1943 he was in the Riga ghetto, where he was in charge of the hospital. He was deported to Buchenwald in 1944, and died there in 1945.