Themistocles Gluck: an unrecognised genius.

Princess Vera's grave in the Korchevatskii cemetery on the outskirts ofKiev is marked by a metal cross in the Catholic rather than the Russian Orthodox style, befitting her Catholic origins tuberculosis of the knee.'9 In 1929 she was appointed professor ofsurgery at the University ofKiev. This was quite an achievement for a princess. She had started to write her memoirs, which were very fictionalised but related to fact. They make up a cycle under the general title Life published in 1930 and 1931 but dealing only with'her life up to 1904. She died in Kiev in 1932 at the age of56. Who knows what shemay have written about her later years, which surely must have been as full and exciting as any of the other professors of surgery about whom so much has been written.