Things to Remember & Appreciate

This is not a trivial piece about another Georgian celebrity. This is about our identity. There truly are things that we need to notice and be grateful for. I saw him in his petite beautiful property in western Georgia, needing my presence as I would need an unexpected pain in the neck, but he graciously and benevolently nodded to my invitation to talk. Professor Archil Khomasuridze, as secluded a person as he happens to be, is nobody’s special comrade, including me, but he is a true friend to his profession and to the people he has always wanted to faithfully serve. I had a solid patriotic reason to have talked to the famous healer and dedicated booster of Georgia’s demographic potential.

I had heard before my recent encounter with Khomasuridze that this year, three appreciable milestones in the country’s medical history were going to be memorialized by the grateful nation: first and utmost, this is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Ioseb Zhordania, the legendary Georgian physician who famously gave his life to the unbeknownst to him little girl, drowning in the ocean as a consequence of an accidental airplane crash. The great man died but he left behind him a unique ideology on the reproduction of human life, which today is one of the most popular and lucrative segments of the world health service. Zhordania founded in Georgia the Institute of Women’s Physiology and Pathology, having then passed ahead of the world for more than thirty years in the field.

Archil Khomasuridze is a medical doctor who has eminently continued his teacher’s works and led the branch to the point where medicinal science is realistically helping the growth of Georgia’s population, so much needed for its physical survival.

The next jubilee is the centenary of Professor Jemal Tstitsishvili, the medicine man who came to the reproduction Institute’s directorial post right after Zhordania’s demise. This is the man who kept up his great predecessor’s professional banner to later give a chance to the young Khomasuridze by commanding him for continuous medical education in the best Soviet schools and clinics in Moscow. And behold, Archil Khomasuridze, an MD at the age of only 34, finds his personality right in the heart of obstetrics and gynecology in the huge soviet country. Years pass and, loaded with tremendous knowledge, professional skills and experience, he returns to his beloved Georgia to head the Zhordania Institute of Reproductive Health. This is exactly where it all started.

Equipped with Zhordania’s outstanding reproductive ideology, Khomasuridze went ahead to embark on the idea of treating infertility and defeating abortion by introducing the contraceptive methodology in women’s life and creating Tube Babies, thus giving a chance to up to ten thousand couples suffering childlessness.

This year, Archil Khomasuridze will be celebrating 20 years since the first ‘tube baby-boy’ who today is a healthy and successful young Georgian with every possible chance to become his nation’s pride. Khomasuridze has pioneered the scientific breakthrough in Georgia which has already yielded thousands and thousands of in-vitro fertilizations.

My wonderful respondent’s information box is full of stories that need to be hammered into a big book of his most interesting professional and personal memories to be bequeathed to Georgia’s medical generations to come. I would love to do the job if I am allowed by the great maestro, but it is not at all important who takes the responsibility for perpetuating his legacy. What matters most is that he is around and ready to share with us the things that are extremely valuable to remember and appreciate.

But the story does not end there. The almost octogenarian Professor Khomasuridze is enviably active at work, leading his amply-staffed Institute of Reproductive Health and vigorous enough to be avidly dreaming and working on the continuation of this amazing nation into the longest possible future.

By Nugzar B. Ruhadze