Saint Luke the Surgeon, Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea
Archbishop and surgeon, confessor of the Soviet years
- Feast day
- June 11
- Lived
- 1877–1961
- Patronage
- Surgeons, cancer patients, those facing operations
Valentin Voino-Yasenetsky was a pioneering surgeon, a Stalin Prize laureate for his work on purulent surgery, and a bishop who operated in his cassock with an icon in the theatre — and spent eleven years in Soviet prisons and exile.
Life
Trained as a surgeon and drawn to medicine specifically to serve peasants, he pioneered regional anaesthesia and wrote the standard Russian textbook on the surgery of infections. Widowed with four children, he was ordained in 1921 and consecrated bishop in 1923, continuing to operate throughout.
He was arrested repeatedly, tortured by sleep deprivation, and exiled to the Arctic, where he continued performing operations in village huts with penknives. During the Second World War he was made chief surgeon of a military hospital in Krasnoyarsk while simultaneously serving as ruling bishop.
Veneration
He received the Stalin Prize in 1946 and gave almost all of it to orphanages. Blind in his last years, he continued to serve. Glorified in 1995, he is one of the most invoked saints in Greece and Russia for surgery and cancer, and his relics rest in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Simferopol.