In 1942, Stalingrad was hell on earth. The director of the Stalingrad Medical Institute and a participant in the battle, A. I. Bernshtein, said so about this:
“I will never forget this last bombing at the crossing. Hell is drawn to me as a resort in comparison with what we have experienced."
Several million people fought on both sides of the front, every minute two or three soldiers of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht died. Naturally, there was no question of any operational burial during the battles. As a result, the terrible unsanitary conditions caused an outbreak of dangerous infectious diseases on the side of the enemy, one of which was cholera. This deadly shaft rolled on the city and the troops stationed in it. It was necessary to suppress the impending epidemic as soon as possible, otherwise, within a few weeks, cholera would wipe out a large part of the army personnel and the civilian population. A talented researcher of international level, Doctor of Science, Professor Zinaida Vissarionovna Ermolyeva, who had been studying cholera for many years, went to the site with a team of doctors.
She knew Stalingrad very well, since she was born nearby, in the city of Frolovo. The doctors' plan was quite simple: upon arrival, disinfect and inoculate the military and civilians with cholera bacteriophage or "predatory" virus, specializing only in cholera vibrios. But after assessing the existing sanitary and epidemiological conditions, Zinaida Ermolyeva asked Moscow for an additional substantial dose of the medicine. However, the train echelon came under a German airstrike, and Stalingrad was practically left alone with a terrible infection. In any other case, cholera would have won, and the consequences for the city would have been disastrous. But in Stalingrad there was Zinaida Vissarionovna, who had vast experience as a microbiologist-researcher, and she organized an improvised laboratory in one of the basements of a destroyed house, in which she grew the required amount of bacteriophage. The fact is that a few years earlier she independently developed a technique for growing cholera bacteriophages, so no one else in the USSR except her was capable of such a thing. For the resources available in the destroyed city, Yermolyeva requested only 300 tons of chloramine and several tons of soap, which were used for the "standard protocol" of total disinfection.
They chlorinated wells, disinfected latrines, set up four evacuation hospitals in Stalingrad itself, mobilized a mass of civilians and third-year students of the local medical institute to fight a deadly infection. To find out the reason for the appearance of cholera, the front intelligence was tasked with delivering the corpses of the Nazis who died from infection. Doctors worked with corpses, isolated characteristic cholera vibrios and cultivated bacteriophages specific to them. Zinaida Ermolyeva organized work in Stalingrad in such a way that 50 thousand people received the bacteriophage vaccine per day, and 2 thousand medical workers examined 15 thousand townspeople daily. It was necessary to phage not only the locals, but also everyone who came and left the besieged city, and this is tens of thousands every day.
Ermolyeva was endowed by the supreme commander in chief with such powers that she could even remove people from the construction of the city's fortifications. It was an unprecedented massive operation of vaccination and population survey in such a short period of time. Event participants recall:
“Everyone who remained in the city took part in this fight against an invisible dangerous enemy. Each Red Cross woman in attendance had 10 apartments under supervision, which they walked around every day, identifying the sick. Others chlorinated wells, were on duty in bakeries, at evacuation points. Both the radio and the press were actively involved in this struggle."
Historical sources cite a remarkable telephone conversation between Stalin and Zinaida Vissarionovna:
"Little sister (as he called the outstanding scientist), maybe we should postpone the offensive?" The answer came immediately: "We will do our job to the end!"
As a result, as the doctor promised, by the end of August 1942 the cholera epidemic was over. Professor Ermolyeva received the Order of Lenin and, together with her colleague from the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, Lydia Yakobson, in 1943, the Stalin Prize of the 1st degree. The award material reads:
"… for participation in organizing and carrying out extensive preventive work on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, for the development of new methods of laboratory diagnostics and phage prophylaxis of cholera …"
By the way, Zinaida Vissarionovna (like Lydia Yakobson) spent the money from the prize on the construction of the La-5 fighter, which received the proud name "Zinaida Yermolyeva". The monograph "Cholera", published in 1942, became important for the world medical community. In it, the researcher summarized her unique 20-year experience in the fight against infection.
Mrs. Penicillin
When Zinaida Ermolyeva was asked about the most significant wartime memory, the professor invariably talked about the test at the end of 1944 on the Baltic front of domestic penicillin. The microbiologist conducted this work with the famous surgeon Nikolai Nikolayevich Burdenko, and the main result was the recovery of 100% of the wounded soldiers of the Red Army who participated in the experiment.
"Not a single cut off leg!"
- Zinaida Ermolyeva said with satisfaction about this.
The history of the emergence of a domestic antibiotic, penicillin-crustosin, began in 1942 and is inextricably linked with the name of Dr. Ermolyeva. The professor, together with his colleague T. I. Balezina, isolated the producer of the antibiotic Penicillum crustosum from the mold that was scraped off the walls of bomb shelters near Moscow. The research team worked at the All-Union Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology and in just six months prepared penicillin for clinical trials. The first site was the Yauza hospital. Zinaida Vissarionovna herself actively studied the effect of yellow powder of penicillin-crustosin on seriously wounded soldiers of the Red Army. She paid special attention to shrapnel and bullet injuries to the bones of the arms and legs, as the most severe. To the delight of Yermolyeva's team, the injuries were treated without complications, without fever and practically without pus. The results were encouraging, and it was decided to put the long-awaited novelty into series at the factory of endocrine preparations in Moscow.
By 1944, three countries possessed technologies for the isolation and industrial production of antibiotics: the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR. At the same time, the microbiologist Howard Walter Flory flew to the Soviet Union for comparative tests of American, British and Soviet antibiotics. The study was carried out on several groups of patients with sepsis in serious condition. Our penicillin turned out to be more effective than the English one - 28 units versus 20 in 1 ml, and with the American penicillin it was on an equal footing. It was Flory, the developer of the penicillin purification process, who called Professor Ermolieva Mrs. Penicillin, and she responded by saying, "Sir Flory is a huge man."
Later, under the leadership of Yermolyeva, preparations of domestic antibiotics streptomycin, tetracycline, chloramphenicol, ekmolin, ekmonovocillin, bicillin were obtained, as well as the combined antibiotic dipasphene.
The path to heroism
Zinaida Vissarionovna was born in 1898, graduated in 1915 with a gold medal from the Mariinsky Don Women's Gymnasium in Novocherkassk and a year later entered the Women's Medical Institute. It was then that Yermolyeva chose the path of a doctor-microbiologist and after graduating from the institute became the head of the bacteriological department of the North Caucasus Bacteriological Institute. The future academician participated in the elimination of the cholera epidemic in 1922 in Rostov-on-Don, and then she encountered cholera-like vibrios, the situation with which was not completely clear. Can they cause cholera or not? Finally, Yermolyeva decided to deal with the question … on herself. At the beginning of the dangerous experiment, she drank a solution of soda, neutralized the acid of the stomach and took after more than one and a half billion previously unexplored live cholera-like vibrios. Disorders in bowel function were diagnosed after 18 hours, and after another 12 hours, a picture of the manifestation of classical cholera appeared in front of the researcher. Analyzes showed the presence of Vibrio cholerae in Yermolyeva's body. In the experiment log, the researcher noted:
"The experience, which almost ended tragically, proved that some cholera-like vibrios, being in the human intestines, can turn into true cholera vibrios that cause disease."
Later, Zinaida Vissarionovna isolated an amazing cholera-like vibrio capable of glowing in the dark, later named after her. Since 1928, the Soviet researcher has been known abroad, she is published in world scientific publications and participates in conferences. At one of them, in Berlin, Zinaida Vissarionovna meets the microbiologist and immunologist Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber, who later becomes her husband. In 1930 they divorced, Zilber in 1937 was taken into custody in connection with the outbreak of the plague in Azerbaijan, later released, but soon again imprisoned for 10 years in the Pechorstroy camp. The second time Yermolyeva marries the chief sanitary inspector of the USSR and the head of the epidemiological department of the Institute of Infectious Diseases Alexei Alexandrovich Zakharov. In 1938 he is also arrested and dies in the prison hospital two years later.
A remarkable legend is mentioned in the Bulletin of the Russian Military Medical Academy:
“Wishing to please Z. V. Ermoliev, I. V. Stalin once asked: "Which of the husbands would she like to see at large?" To the great amazement of Joseph Vissarionovich, Ermolyeva named her first husband, Lev Zilber, with whom she was already divorced. To the question of the surprised leader, she briefly answered: "Science needs him." And she immediately moved on to discuss the topic that had occupied her lately - the creation of penicillin. And Stalin did not refuse this request to a fragile but resolute woman."
Of course, this is most likely fiction, but it is known for certain that Zinaida Vissarionovna long and methodically sought the release of Zilber. In this she was helped by the whole color of domestic medicine: Burdenko, Orbeli, Engelhardt and others. As a result, Lev Zilber returned to scientific activity as a virologist and later received the Stalin Prize.
In 1945, Professor Zinaida Ermolyeva was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, and 18 years later she became its academician. From 1945 to 1947 Zinaida Vissarionovna - Director of the Institute for Infection Prevention. In 1947, on its basis, the All-Union Research Institute of Penicillin was created, where she headed the department of experimental therapy until 1954. From 1952 until the end of her days (1975) Yermolyeva headed the Department of Microbiology at the Central Institute for Advanced Medical Education, and since 1956 - the laboratory of new antibiotics at the department.
Zinaida Ermolyeva became the prototype of Dr. Tatyana Vlasenkova in the trilogy of Veniamin Kaverin "Open Book" and the main character of the play "On the threshold of mystery" by Alexander Lipovsky.
