Lazar Solomonovich Minor

Minor received his education at the University of Moscow, where he was a student of Aleksei Kozhevnikov (1836–1902).

Afterwards, he worked in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), and in Berlin with Carl Otto Westphal (1833–1890) and Emanuel Mendel (1839–1907).

Minor's name is associated with Minor's disease, a disorder involving a sudden attack of back pain and paralysis caused by hemorrhage into the spinal cord, and also "Minor's sign", a condition in which patients with lower back problems require support of the lower back in order to rise from a seated position.

Although not himself a communist nor even a political radical, Minor acknowledged the debt that ethnic Russian Jews owed to the Bolshevik government for tearing down prejudicial occupational barriers and opening up a new class of positions and promotions that were denied to Jews by the Tsarist regime.

Minor stated, "though in the old Russia I could get no promotion for twenty years by reason of being a Jew, today I am not only a professor but also dean of the medical school.