Miron (Meir) Vovsi was born in 1897 in the town of Kreslavka in Vitebsk Province (present-day Krāslava, Latvia). His father, Semyon Vovsi, was a timber merchant. In 1914, after finishing the Riga Real School, Miron became a student at Yuriev University in Tartu, Estonia. According to his daughter's recollections, he dreamed of becoming either a mathematician or a physicist; however, because of the "Jewish quota" on admissions to the relevant departments, he had to enroll in the Faculty of Medicine instead. By his own words, he "became a physician involuntarily, due to a misunderstanding."
In 1918, Vovsi moved to Moscow and began to study at the Faculty of Medicine of Moscow University, from which he graduated in 1919 (as part of the first cohort of doctors to graduate in Soviet Russia). He volunteered to enlist in the nascent Red Army during the Russian Civil War, and served as a senior physician in the Petrograd Proletarian Division.
In 1921, he was sent to attend the courses for physicians run by the Commissariat (Ministry) of Health. After a year of study, he was elected resident physician of the Faculty Therapeutic Clinic of Moscow University (for a term of three years). In 1925, he was already a senior fellow at the Clinical Department of the Institute of Functional Diagnostics and Experimental Therapy. In 1927, Vovsi traveled to Germany and worked in clinics and laboratories in Berlin, Kiel, and Frankfurt-am-Mein. After returning to the USSR, he combined medical practice with science, working at clinics, hospitals, and research centers.
At the same time, Vovsi was involved in the activities of the Medical Publishing House, and established the magazine Sovetskii Vrach (“The Soviet Physician”), whose first issue came out in 1930. In 1936, he defended his PhD thesis and became a professor. He was then appointed head of the Third Therapy Department at the Central Institute of Physicians' Training, at the well-known Botkin Hospital in Moscow. He would work there until the very end of his life.
In 1941, at the time of the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Vovsi miraculously escaped death. According to his daughter's recollections, that summer he intended to travel to Latvia to visit his brother and eighty-year-old father – but, by chance, the departure was postponed for a week. As he would learn after the end of the Nazi occupation, his father was killed immediately, while his brother and his family spent more than two years in a ghetto, and were killed on the eve of the liberation of the country by the Red Army.
In August 1941, Professor Vovsi was appointed chief therapist of the Red Army, and in 1943 he became a major general of the medical service. During the war, he assisted therapeutic aid organizations in military units and initiated the development of field therapy. He remained the chief therapist of the Red Army until 1950.
In 1948, Vovsi was elected an academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and he was also the editor-in-chief of Clinical Medicine, one of the most prestigious Soviet medical journals.
Vovsi's hardest trial came in the early 1950s, when the state security apparatus began to peddle the infamous “doctors' plot,” which marked the culmination of the late Stalinist antisemitic campaign. Vovsi, a renowned therapist and the attending physician of prominent Soviet military leaders, was not only a Jew, but also the cousin of the late Solomon Mikhoels (né Vovsi) – chairman of the Jewish Anti–Fascist Committee and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater, who had been murdered by KGB agents in 1948. Thus, the general and academician was the ideal candidate for the role of leader of a nefarious cabal of "killer doctors." In November, Vovsi was arrested on charges of sabotage and espionage.
One of his co-defendants, Professor Yakov Rapoport, wrote: “Vovsi told me how he had been forced to confess to being a German spy, as well. Upon hearing this demand, he actually burst into tears. He told his interrogators:
“'What do you want from me? After all, I have already admitted to being an American and British spy, isn't that enough for you? The Germans have slaughtered my whole family in Dvinsk, and you want me to admit that I was their spy?' In response, I received a stream of filthy abuse, followed by the demand: 'Professor, you bastard! Don't you play coy with us! You were a German spy, as well.' And so, I signed a confession, according to which I was a German spy, too.”
Yakov Rapoport, Na rubezhe dvukh epokh: Delo vrachei 1953 goda [Moscow, 1988], p. 123.
After Stalin's death, on 3 April 1953, Vovsi and the other arrested physicians were released, following a special decision by the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR.
In the last decade of his life, Vovsi suffered from a debilitating and fatal sarcoma, losing a leg. Despite his illness, he continued to work at the clinic, lecture, and analyze complex diagnostic cases. Yakov Rapoport recalled:
"Six years after his release, he developed a sarcoma of the leg, which required amputation (he died shortly afterward). I visited him on the day (or two days) after the surgery. He was in a slightly excited, euphoric mood, and told me:
-- Can my present condition be compared to the way I was back then? Now, I have merely lost a leg, but remained a human being; back then, I ceased to be a human being.”
Rapoport, Na rubezhe dvukh epoch, p. 125.
The terminally ill Vovsi spent the last month of his life at his office in the Botkin Hospital, passing away in June 1960. He is buried at the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow.
