Kramer, Vasilii

Kramer, Vasilii Vasil’evich 

Born Feb. 21 (Mar. 4), 1876, in Moscow; died there Apr. 24, 1935. Soviet neuropathologist; one of the founders of the Soviet school of neurosurgery. Honored Scientist of the RSFSR (1933).

Kramer graduated from the medical department of Moscow University in 1900 and then worked under V. K. Rot and L. S. Minor. He became a professor in 1920. In 1929, together with N. N. Burdenko, he founded and became one of the directors of the neurosurgical clinic of the State Institute of Roentgenology. (It became the Central Institute of Neurosurgery in 1934 and is now known as the N. N. Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR.)

Kramer was concerned with the localization of functions. He studied and described the syndromes of the tentorium cerebelli and of the quadrigeminal plate. He described the problems involved in diagnosing extramedullary tumors of the posterior cranial fossa. He also did research on visual perception of shape, light, and color and on visual stereognosis. Kramer was the attending physician of V. I. Lenin in the last years of his life (from May 1922). He was the chief editor of Zhurnalpsikhologii, nevrologii i psikhiatrii (Journal of Psychology, Neurology, and Psychiatry; from 1923).

WORKS

Uchenie o lokalizatsiiakh, 2nd ed. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931.
”K ucheniiu ob opticheskom vospriiatii formy.” Sovetskaia nevropatologiia, psikhiatriia i psikhogigiena, 1934, vol. 3, nos. 2–3.

REFERENCES

Rapoport, M. lu. “Tvorcheskii put’ prof. V. V. Kramera (1876–1935).” Voprosy neirokhirurgii, 1950, vol. 14, no. 3.