Volodymyr Karavayev

Volodymyr Karavayev (also transliterated as Vladimir Karavayev; 8 July 1811 – 3 March 1892) was an Imperial Russian surgeon and ophthalmologist. He is best known for founding the Faculty of Medicine of the Kyiv Imperial University of St. Volodymyr (now the Kyiv Medical Institute), which he worked at for over four decades.

Born in Vyatka, in the Russian Empire, Karavayev was first a free listener at the Kazan Federal University, before moving to St. Petersburg for surgical practice. In St. Petersburg he was greatly influenced by his time at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, as he admired the surgical consultants' work. He then went abroad to Berlin, where he first met Nikolay Pirogov, who would become a lifelong acquaintance and who he would follow the University of Dorpat before going to the Kronstadt Naval Hospital in 1840. After performing a large volume of work at Kronstadt, including inventing an experimental technique for treating effusive pericarditis, he was appointed as the inaugural Head of the Department of Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine of the Kyiv Imperial University of St. Volodymyr. After going abroad again to learn how to manage the institution, he came back to the university and was then appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine. Over the next few decades, Karavayev would continue to work in the Faculty of Medicine, where he helped organize and found departments there until his death in 1892.