Birth of Petros Kalantarian (October 20, 1735)

Petros Kalantarian was the first Armenian doctor who received his medical education in Russia. 

He was born on October 20, 1735, in New Julfa, the Armenian suburb of Ispahan (Iran). He was ordained an acolyte of the Armenian Church in 1748 and three years later he left his hometown. He moved to Astrakhan (Russia), where he lived until 1760. He left for Moscow and shortly thereafter he moved to St. Petersburg. He became the first Armenian doctor who studied at the hospital-school of Moscow—renamed Military-Medical Academy in 1798—and graduated as a physician in 1764.  

For the next nine years, he worked as a military doctor until he was discharged in 1774. After finishing his service, Kalantarian settled in Moscow, where he set up his practice and lived for the rest of his life.  

In the meantime, he had married in 1766 and had many children and grandchildren, but apparently by 1804, when he wrote his autobiographical notes in the family copy of St. Gregory of Narek՛s The Book of Lamentations, his wife Shushan had passed away and only one daughter, Mariam, was still alive.  

There are few surviving references to him after 1804. He appears to have served in the Russian army during the Napoleonic wars and was still alive as late as1824. He died sometime afterwards, though the exact date remains unknown. 

Kalantarian is noted as the author of one of the first Armenian medical treatises of modern times, Medical Book (Բժշկարան), written in 1789 and published in 1793. He described a variety of illnesses, their pathology, and treatment, and the book also included a Latin–Armenian dictionary of medical terms. He paid special attention to the medicinal plants of the Armenian Highland.