Gleb N. Budzilovich, MD.

Abstract

G leb Budzilovich, a long-time member of the American Association of Neuropathologists, died on October 8, 2014, at age 91 years. Gleb spent almost his entire professional career in the Division of Neuropathology at New York University (NYU) Medical Center and its affiliate Bellevue Hospital. Gleb had the kind of life about which novels are written and movies are made. He was born and raised in what was then the Byelorussian Republic within the former Soviet Union, but he always considered himself a true “Russian” despite some hints of Ukrainian or other lineage. He grew up under Stalin and, because his family was not in political favor, he acquired a lifelong hatred (there is no more apt word) of communism, which extended to a dislike of the color red. He was a teenager when Hitler's armies invaded European Russia, and he lived in the occupied zone for 4 years; he worked in a German-run hospital during part of this time. There, he acquired and survived a plethora of infectious diseases, including epidemic typhus; he told me he saw the louse that bit him. He also told me about being treated as a “lower form of human” by the German military conquerors. Nevertheless, when the war ended, his detestation for Stalin and communism outweighed his feelings about the Nazis so he escaped from the USSR and ended up in Munich. By that time, he had graduated from the equivalent of high school (gymnasium). He then applied to and was accepted into medical school there. In due course, he …