the Imperial Academy of Military Medicine in Saint Petersburg, and undertook three years of military service in this period. He first used ether as an anaesthetic in 1847, and investigated cholera from 1848. In search of an effective teaching method, he decided to apply anatomical research on frozen corpses. Pirogov called it “ice anatomy”. Thus, a new medical discipline was born — topographic anatomy. After a few years of such study anatomy Pirogov published the first anatomical atlas, Topographical anatomy of the human body (vol. 1–4, 1851–1854). 1847 left for the Caucasus, where the Russian army waged a war against the local mountain peoples. Here he wanted to test the operating methods he had developed in the field. In the Caucasus, he first applied dressing with bandages soaked in starch. He worked as an army surgeon in the Crimean War, arriving in Simferopol on 11 December 1854. From his works in the Crimea, he is considered to be the father of Russian field surgery. He followed work by Louis-Joseph Seutin in introducing plaster casts for setting broken bones, and developed a new osteoplastic method for amputation of the foot, known as the "Pirogov amputation". He was also the first to use anesthesia in the field, particularly during the siege of Sevastopol, and he introduced in Russian army a system of triage – sorting wounded soldiers into five categories. He encouraged female volunteers as an organised corps of nurses, the Khrestovozdvizhenskaya (ru) at the Saint Petersburg Charity Encyclopedia community of nurses established by Grand Duchess Yelena Pavlovna in 1854. Return and retirement In 1856 after the end of war he returned to Saint Petersburg and withdrew from the academy following the suggestion to work as a superintendent of schools of the Odessa Educational District which united several governorates. He wrote an influential paper on the problems of pedagogy, arguing for the education of the poor, non-Russians, and women. (He was influential in his family's decision to educate his niece Henriette Joudra who would go on to earn her medical doctorate and become the first woman to open a private medical practice in Geneva, Switzerland). He also argued against early specialisation, and for the development of secondary schools. In 1858 he received the rank of Privy Councillor and was transferred to Kiev as a superintendent of schools of the Kiev Educational District after disagreements with the Odessa governor general. In 1861 he