A Hero of Any Time: Luka Voyno-Yasenetsky
Saint people are heroes and objects of mimicry for Russian people. That’s why we call our motherland ‘Holy Rus’.
Luka Voyno-Yasenetsky was one of the great people for the nation, who only couldn’t do something for himself. A call for duty was so much important for him that he didn’t rely on luck or depend on any case. He couldn’t be restricted by doing something he likes. He found himself something to do which would eventually be beneficial to many others.
Saint, the confessor Luka, before monastic vows Valentin Felixovich Voyno-Yasenetsky — was an embodied evangelical sample for everyone. Whenever he was in prison, study department, or the operating table, he was a proponent, he was always doing pastoral and medical activity. He was a great person who dedicated his own life to God, medicine and humans.
When I was reading the treatise ‘Science and religion’ which was written by Luka Voyno-Yasenetsky in 1910, I was nicely surprised that I hardly spoke due to the delight reading on it. I reached the ‘entrails of human nature’, a special part of soul. I started understanding the gist of things, and managed to ‘create truth’ from the experiences and through observing genius humans. For example, I talk with clear thought and inspired contemporary without referring to anything. I can’t quote anything because any word deserves special attention and deep thoughts. The syllable in the treatise was understandable and enjoyable, it didn’t have excess information but it did inspire the reader. If you want to know something about yourself, I recommend you to read it.
Autobiography from Saint Luka Voyno-Yasenetsky — “I had loved suffering that awesome purifying soul” shocked me! People describe their difficult life without hidden words yet we believe on it, in fact his life seems non mysterious. How could the genius thoughts, science discoveries, art, belief, feat, and life came to his mind? Well, the answer is simple, fate always comes after belief.
Saint Luka did well in his education and graduated from Kiev medical faculty. Since then he started to treat people who lived in the rural area. This shocked all departments, professors, and his classmates because he was a science person with a brilliant mind. They couldn’t understand why he was serving the province hospital. He went around cities within Russian and he worked wherever he could, he left a significant number of miraculously healed patients. He was always there where people suffer, where people need him.
He treated patients in Kursk. It began from the hospital of Lyubazh of Fatezh county after that in Rylsk with only 10 beds. He operated a lot and he had such a good reputation. Patients came to him from other counties. I remembered one case of him. There was a young pauper, he got blind at his early ages he came out with an epiphany after the surgery. He gathered many blind people from over the county within two months. All of them came to him in a long queue, coming one by one, holding each other by their sticks and waiting for his treatment. He wrote his first articles In Lyubazh which were “Elephantiasis of the face, a plexiformormorphic neuroma” and “Retrograde contusion at hernia of the intestinal loop”. These articles made a great breakthrough in the medicine field at that time.
He had done a lot of great works without neglecting his job as a surgeon. He visited houses of his patients, studied the tissues with microscope after operations at night time, drew pictures of the preparations and wrote science articles. All these contributions made him an incredible great Saint.
What he did was actually considered a martyrdom in Russia in that period of time. He went through many exiles, prisons, interrogations, tortures, and even horrible war years only because he had put his effort on those operations. He was warned by the Government and threatened to be executed by shooting from doing the pastoral service. However, they appreciated Luka for his remarkable scientific activities. He would probably be the only Saint who was awarded by the Stalin Prize for “Essays on purulent surgery” and other treatises. Physicians saved million lives during the Great Patriotic War by getting knowledge from him. Valentin Felixovich was a great diagnostician. He managed to operate those difficult surgeries with any organs. His science works are still accurate and interesting. Literally, the divine craft was in his acts.
The limitations of writing articles don’t allow me to express what I would like to share. It is impossible to apply everything that I have understood. Survived. Feeling. The sparks of the life from this one great man have been passed on to a few people. They are motivated to search on the Internet, read, think and focus for a couple minutes on their strange, distant, difficult and holy life.
In the life of Saint Luka, you can understand what is mercy, soul, human with belief, blessed fate of physician. As the saying goes, ‘for any doctor there is no case but only alive suffering humans.’
Text Diana Boytseva
Edited by Lai Yen Xing, Reshma Durai
