Pauls Stradiņš (17 January 1896 – 14 August 1958) was a Latvian professor, physician, and surgeon[1] who founded the Museum of the History of Medicine in Riga.

He graduated from the Riga Alexander Gymnasium in 1914 and entered the S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), where his professors included the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov.

During World War I, Stradiņš was an army doctor on the Russian Western Front and in Persia, and then the chief of a surgical department in Vladivostok.

degree) in the academy's hospital surgery clinic, headed by Professor Sergey Fedorov, the former private surgeon of Tsar Nicholas II.

Three years later, he ran an experiment on himself: A periarterial sympathectomy (pioneered by Mathieu Jaboulay)[2] was performed on his left shoulder by V. N. Shamov, and Stradiņš personally evaluated the results.

In 1927, he defended his second doctoral thesis at the University of Latvia, summarizing the results of his research in Petrograd, Rochester, and Riga on the genesis and treatment of obliterating endarteritis.

He paid primary attention to the treatment of inoperable cancer patients, contacted experts from Germany and Austria, and presented his preliminary results on the topic at the 1st Conference of Medical Doctors of the Baltic Countries and Finland, held in 1938 in Helsinki.

He was one of the few non-Communist Latvian intellectuals who stayed for patriotic reasons and tried to take positive action under the new conditions, and he thus became a key figure not only in medicine, but also in public activities.

However, he was allowed to continue working as a professor, and until 1950 he held the position of director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine at the Latvian Academy of Sciences.

Stradiņš was a many-sided physician, active in surgery, oncology, physiotherapy, pharmacology, blood transfusion, urology, and dieting, as well as health care administration.

He published about 80 scientific papers in Russian, German, Latvian, Polish, Finnish, Lithuanian, and English, and a three-volume, Russian-language edition of his selected works was issued posthumously from 1963–65.

They had four children: His grandchildren are: Among his closest associates and colleagues were Ēvalds Ezerietis, Vladimirs Utkins, Jānis Slaidiņš, Veronika Rozenbaha, Jevgēnijs Linārs, Lazar Yavorkovski, Ksenija Skulme, Ojārs Aleksis, Eduards Smiltēns, Izidors Sjakste, Velta Bramberga, Rasma Ceplīte, Guntis Vitenbergs, Anna Bormane, Kārlis Dolietis, Mihails Dubinskis, Arturs Rocēns, Valdis Kraulis, Pāvils Purviņš, Vilhelms Pampe, Jānis Erdmanis, and Aleksandrs Marovskis.