A virtuoso of medical diagnostics and therapeutic skill, Vovsi was one of the most popular doctors in Moscow, he was also considered the best lecturer in internal medicine. Votchal was an internationally recognized naturalist, as well as an inventor and leading specialist in medical technology, the founder of pulmonology and clinical pharmacology in the USSR. They were brought together by the Great Patriotic War: Major General Vovsi created the military therapeutic service of the Red ( Soviet) Army, Colonel Votchal, as the chief therapist of the Volkhov Front, was one of his assistants. From 1944 Vovsi headed the Department of Clinical and Military Field Therapy of the CIU of Physicians; Votchal was the deputy head of the department. The authors of the article consistently demonstrate the common features and differences between Vovsi and Votchal on the winding path of life and reveal the reasons for the breakup of their long-term relationship.

The M. Pevsner's school of nutritionists and gastroenterologists is reviewed as a classic model of scientific clinical school of 20-th century. For the first time reliable scientific biographie of one of the pioneers of the USSR gastroenterology professor M.I.Pevsner is presented, and his disciples are named. The influence of the socio-political factors on the fate of the scientists and related scientific areas is shown.

The paradoxical expression «superfluous people» introduced into the literature by I.S.Turgenev was widely used by the Russian literary critics and in the Russian culture history became the generally accepted, even stereotyped term. In this article this notion is used to show-up the extraordinary personality and amazing destiny of G.I.Sokolski, an outstanding representative of the mid-19th century medical science and professor of the Moscow University. The authors for the first time involved in their analysis such sources as letters written by Sokolski and other persons who played decisive roles in his destiny. These letters are kept the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), manuscripts department of the Russian State Library and in department of written sources of the State Historical Museum. The authors also draw in numerous materials of memoir literature that characterize not only the very hero of their narrative but also the university and urban environment.

This part of the article is devoted to investigation of circumstances and reasons of G.I.Sokoloski's unexpected discharge from the university, his life as a popular Moscow private practitioner and the dull final of his life which ended up in a quarter of century long desolation. Unraveling barely visible tangle of university plot in accordance with the detective stories' laws the authors come to the conclusion that not debacle of universities during «the Nicholas reaction», not the banishment of ‘the spirit of materialism and freethinking' from universities but the restless mind, innovative and creative ambitions, a peevish, ‘thorny' characters, that is the very personality of Sokolski made him an inconvenient, unwanted figure for the higher authorities and predetermined his premature resignation. According to the authors, Skoloski belonged to a peculiar psychological type of natural scientists that were in a permanent discordance with the surrounding ambient. These were the out-of-season people. Such persons belong to the Future but are unwanted by the Present.

In history of Russia, the imperial as well as the Soviet, the Military medical academy (MMA), together with Moscow University, has always been the leading center of medical science and education. In 1920s its faculty was decorated with names of prominent representatives of medical and biological science: physiologist I.P.Pavlov, pharmacologist N.P.Kravkov, anatomist V.N.Tonkov, clinicians including surgeon S.P.Fedorov, therapists N.Ya.Chistov and M.V.Yankovski etc. Activity of these remarkable people set the exceptionally high level of the Academy’s scientific output. Such was the historical medical canon. As any canon it is not devoid of certain mythologizing and has reverse side. Correspondence between I.P.Pavlov and N.P.Kravkov which is being published by V.I.Borodulin, the historian of medical science, is an eloquent testimony of the real moral and work climate which prevailed in that period in MMA (and, obviously, not only in this institution). V.I.Borodulin also examines the role which has the civil position of a scientific school founder and some other issues of scientific schools formations.