Professor Georgy Nestorovich Speransky (1873-1969): A great soviet paediatrician

This paper is a biography of a great Soviet paediatrician, Professor Georgy Nestorovich Speransky, known as the founder of Russian neonatology. He was the organizer, Director and scientific leader of the first State Research Institute of Maternity and Infant Care in the USSR which later was reorganized as the State Research Institute of Paediatrics of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. He organized the first Russian medical department of childhood diseases at the Central Institute of Continuing Education for Medical Doctors, where he and his colleagues taught physiology and pathology. He was one of the initiators of a free state system of maternity and infant health care and infant mortality was decreased tenfold.