Nikolai Korotkov was born to a merchant family at 40 Milenskaia Street in Kursk on February 26, 1874. He attended the Kursk Gymnasium. He entered the medical faculty of Kharkov University in 1893 and transferred to Moscow University in 1895, where he graduated with distinction in 1898. He was appointed resident intern to professor Alexander Bobrov at the surgical clinic of Moscow university. Korotkov was given leave of absence to serve with the Russian military forces in the Far East during the Boxer Rebellion in China 1900. He was attached to the Red Cross in the Iversh Community under Dr Aleksinskii. The journey to the Far East entailed extensive travel by way of the Trans-Siberian railroad, through Irkutsk to Vladivostok and he returned to Moscow via Japan, Singapore, Ceylon and the Suez Canal to reach the Black Sea and Feodosiya. Korotkov was honoured with the Order of St. Anna for "outstandingly zealous labours in helping the sick and wounded soldiers". On his return Nikolai Korotkov turned his mind from military to academic pursuits and translated Eduard Albert's monograph "Die Chirurgische Diagnostik" from German to Russian. In 1903, Dr Sergey Fedorov was appointed professor of surgery at the Military Medical Academy at St Petersburg, and he invited Korotkov to join him as assistant surgeon. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905, Korotkov went to Harbin in Manchuria as senior surgeon in charge of the Second St George's Unit of the Red Cross. He became interested in vascular surgery and began to collect cases for his doctoral thesis, which included 41 of 44 case reports of patients who were part of his war experience in the hospital at Harbin. Returning to St Petersburg in April 1905 he began to prepare his thesis, but it was a presentation to the Imperial Military Medical Academy in 1905 that earned him lasting fame. The technique of blood pressure measurement was reported in less than a page of the "Izvestie Imp. Voiennomedicinskoi Akademii" : The critical comments of Korotkov's peers were dealt with in an adroit manner, and he appeared a month later at the Imperial Military Academy with animal experiments to support his theory that the sounds he had described were produced locally, rather than in the heart. He earned the approbation of professor M. V. Yanovsky, who declared: "Korotkov has noticed and intelligently utilised a phenomenon which many observers have overlooked." Yanovsky and his pupils verified the accuracy of the technique and described the phases of the auscultatory sounds and for a time technique was known as the Korotkov-Yanovsky method. Nikolai Korotkov, then serving as research physician to the mining district of Vitimsko-Olekminsky in Siberia, received his doctorate in 1910. After that he served as surgeon to the workers of the gold mines of Lensk. Here he witnessed Tsarist atrocities and was affected deeply by the murder of unarmed striking miners. After this Korotkov returned to St. Petersburg and during the First World War he was surgeon to "The Charitable House for disabled soldiers" in Tsarskoe Selo. He welcomed the October Revolution after which he was physician-in-chief of the Mechnikov Hospital in Petrograd until his death from lung tuberculosis on March 14, 1920.
Korotkoff sounds are pulse-synchronous circulatory sounds heard through the stethoscope in auscultation of blood pressure using Riva-Rocci's sphygmomanometer.
Korotkoff test or Korotkoff sign is a collateral circulation test: in aneurysm, if the blood pressure in the peripheral circulation remains fairly high while the artery above the aneurysm is compressed, the collateral circulation is good.
