Vincentini Xenia
Main achievement
Honorary Doctor of Russia
About
Xenia Vincentini was born on August 29, 1907, in Chișinău, into a family of Italian origin, being the daughter of road engineer Maxmilian Nikolaievici Vincentini and Sofia Teodorovna Trofimova. Her father came from the descendants of Italian winemakers who settled in the Russian Empire, while her grandfather, Nikolai Vikentievici Vincentini, had been a renowned winemaker and educator in the field of viticulture. After various academic and family developments, the family settled in Odesa in the 1920s, where Xenia attended a vocational construction school, where her classmate was the future engineer and constructor Serghei Pavlovici Korolev, whom she would later marry. After completing her medical studies at the Kharkiv Medical Institute in 1930, Xenia Vincentini was assigned to the city of Alchevsk in the Donetsk region, where she distinguished herself by managing a severe epidemic of typhus and dysentery. In 1931, she was transferred to Moscow, where she married Serghei Korolev, and was then recalled to Alchevsk, returning permanently to Moscow in 1932. Here she developed her medical career at the Municipal Clinical Hospital alongside distinguished colleagues such as Professor Mihail Osipovici Fridland and Doctor Boris Abramovici Șimeliovici, who provided her with special support during the difficult period after her husband's arrest in 1938. Xenia Maximilianovna Vincentini was an exceptional surgeon who worked for 60 years, over 40 of them at the operating table in the S.P. Botkin Hospital in Moscow, where she became a Doctor of Medical Sciences and a professor. She developed a revolutionary method for treating fractures through alcohol-novocaine blockade, which proved effective in treating the wounded during World War II. Until the end of her life, on October 28, 1991, she received testimonials of gratitude from thousands of patients she saved, being awarded the title of Honored Doctor of the RSFSR. She was married for the second time to engineer Evgeny Sergeevich Shchetinnikov, a colleague and associate of Korolev from the Research Institute of Reactive Motion.
