In 1960, a group of foreign doctors arrived in the USSR to gather detailed information about the life of Russian doctor Nikolai Sergeyevich Korotkov. They were preparing information for the 50th anniversary of the defense of his dissertation "Experience in Determining the Strength of Arterial Collaterals." Simply put, Korotkov developed a method for measuring blood pressure. However, to the surprise of the foreign delegation, almost nothing was known about him in the Soviet Union.

Doctor Korotkov was born in 1874 in Kursk, graduated from the medical faculty of Kharkov University, and then voluntarily joined the Red Cross unit. He was sent to China, where the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1900. The army had many severely wounded, and doctors could not operate on everyone in time. Upon arriving in Manchuria, the Russian doctors built a temporary hospital themselves, covered it with cardboard and tarpaulins, and thoroughly disinfected it.

Operations were performed two to five times a day, and sometimes even therapists helped, as there was a shortage of staff. It is said that practice makes a surgeon, and it was there that Korotkov deeply studied vascular surgery in practice. Later, he worked in field hospitals on the fronts of the Russo-Japanese War and, enriched with experience, returned to Petersburg.

Korotkov believed that blood pressure was of great importance and successfully defended his project on the acoustic method of its measurement. He became a pioneer of modern vascular surgery. At the same time, he did not seek fame and did not boast of his discovery. During World War I, he again, on his own initiative, operated on the wounded in Tsarskoye Selo. Until his death, he worked as the chief physician of Mechnikov Hospital in Petrograd and died of tuberculosis at the age of 46 in March 1920. His contribution to the development of vascular surgery was only remembered half a century later.