Lazar Solomonovich Minor
Lazar Solomonovich Minor was a Russian neurologist who was a native of Vilnius.
Minor received his education at the University of Moscow, where he was a student of Aleksei Kozhevnikov. Afterwards, he worked in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot, and in Berlin with Karl [Friedrich Otto Westphal|Carl Otto Westphal] and Emanuel Mendel. In 1884 he became a lecturer of neurology at the University of Moscow, and was later a co-founder of the Moscow Association of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists.
Minor's name is associated with Minor's disease, a disorder involving a sudden attack of back pain and paralysis caused by hemorrhage into the spinal cord, and also "Minor's sign", a condition in which patients with lower back problems require support of the lower back in order to rise from a seated position. This sign is often indicative of sciatica, sacroiliac lesions or lumbosacral lesions.
Together with Edward Flatau and Louis Jacobsohn-Lask, he published a textbook on the pathological anatomy of the nervous system called Handbuch der pathologischen Anatomie der Nervensystems.
Although not himself a communist nor even a political radical, Minor acknowledged the debt that ethnic Russian Jews owed to the Bolshevik government for tearing down prejudicial occupational barriers and opening up a new class of positions and promotions that were denied to Jews by the Tsarist regime. Minor stated, "though in the old Russia I could get no promotion for twenty years by reason of being a Jew, today I am not only a professor but also dean of the medical school. I am not a radical but I must acknowledge the debt of the Jews to the new rulers."