St. Luke of Crimea

St. Luke of Crimea was born Valentin Voyno-Yasenetsky on 27 April 1877 at Kerch in the Russian Empire. He became a distinguished surgeon and a pioneer of regional anesthesia, and his treatise on the surgery of infected wounds became a standard work; yet at the height of his medical career, and in the teeth of the atheist Soviet regime, he was ordained a priest in 1921 and soon consecrated a bishop, taking the name Luke.

For his open profession of the faith he was arrested again and again, enduring years of imprisonment, interrogation, and exile in Siberia, even as he continued to operate on the sick and to teach. During the Second World War he served as a surgeon to the wounded while still a bishop, and afterward governed the diocese of Simferopol in the Crimea until his death, remarkably receiving a Stalin Prize for his medical writings. Blind in his last years, he died on 11 June 1961. Glorified as a saint and confessor in 1996, he is venerated as a patron of physicians and the sick.