A prominent anatomist, talented teacher and public man, a fellow of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine professor M. S. Kondratyev was born on January 2, 1888, in the Tyotkino village of Kursk province. Having graduated from the high school in Sumy in 1907, he became a student of the medical faculty of the Kharkov University. M. S. Kondratyev took his study of all medical disciplines very seriously. In 1912 he graduated from the medical faculty with a first-class honours degree and in 1913 began to work as a free-lance dissector of the Normal Anatomy Department of the Kharkov University. Imperfection of that time metods of research of the nervous system attracted Mykola Kondratyev’s attention and as a result of laborious work he created the own, absolutely original method of research. Description of this method became the basis of his thesis “To a method of selective macromicroscopic staining of the vegetative nervous system” for a doctor’s degree, which he defended in 1922.
In 1923 M. Kondratyev was elected a professor of the Normal Anatomy Department of the Odessa State Medical Institute, where he spent the most fruitful years studying nervous formations of the thoracic and abdominal regions and pelvis.
On February 22, 1939 M. Kondratyev became a fellow of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the active worker of which he had been up to the end of his life.
Professor M. S. Kondratyev died on the 7th of March, 1951 and was buried on the Second City Cemetery of Odessa.