Khrushchev-era health minister who presided over the World Health Assembly
24 May 1962, on a hillside in Pregny, Geneva: Kurashov picked up a trowel and declared, 'The building to be constructed here shall stand as a symbol and focal point for the hope of all humanity to some day be free from disease.'
The son of a railway switchman, Kurashov trained as a psychiatrist at Kazan Medical Institute and became its director at just 31. After serving as deputy health minister of the RSFSR, he rose to USSR Minister of Health in 1959. During the Khrushchev years he expanded the Soviet healthcare network, reformed medical education, and served as the first editor of the popular-science magazine Zdorovye (Health). In 1962 he was elected president of the 15th World Health Assembly in Geneva and laid the foundation stone for the new WHO headquarters. Under his tenure the USSR backed the WHO smallpox eradication programme, and when smallpox was imported into Moscow in 1959–1960, Kurashov oversaw the rapid containment and mass vaccination that stopped the outbreak within weeks.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1931Graduated from Kazan Medical Institute, specialised in psychiatry
- 1935–1941Chief physician, Kazan Psychiatric Hospital; regional psychiatrist, Tatar ASSR
- 1941–1942Director of Kazan Medical Institute
- 1942–1953Deputy Minister of Health of the RSFSR
- 1953–1955Deputy Minister of Health of the USSR
- 1955–1959Minister of Health of the RSFSR
- 1959–1965Minister of Health of the USSR
- 1962President of the 15th World Health Assembly
Organizing Health Services and Medical Education
After becoming USSR minister of health in January 1959, Kurashov combined health administration with research that treated medical organization as a matter of social hygiene. At the 1960 All-Union conference of health workers, he presented an analysis of the population’s health. His survey of Soviet healthcare, published in volume 30 of the Great Medical Encyclopedia in 1963, used statistics to examine population change, disease and mortality, medical staffing, outpatient and hospital services, rural care, sanitary-epidemiological work, and budgets. In addressing tuberculosis, he argued that in-depth screening of selected population groups was more effective than indiscriminate mass examinations. On hospital policy, he opposed expanding small hospitals and advocated well-equipped, adequately staffed interdistrict hospitals, as well as a regional hospital with all specialized departments in every regional capital. In medical education, he argued for a six-year course against scholars who considered five years sufficient, and helped establish social hygiene as a subject in medical institutes. From 1955 he headed the health-organization department at the First Moscow Medical Institute, where he supervised 13 candidate-of-sciences dissertations over ten years.