Born in 1878, the son of a clerk and grandson of a serf. He was educated at the University of Yuriev, more familiar under its German name of Dorpat, and from 1918 to 1941 known by its Estonian name of Tartu. During the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 he served as a voluntary medical worker. After qualification he served as house surgeon and later assistant professor in the university surgical clinic, and then went to Petersburg for postgraduate work in Pavlov's physiological laboratory. He was appointed professor of operative surgery at Yuriev in 1912 and professor of clinical surgery in 1914. His chief interest was in surgery of the central nervous system and he worked abroad with Oppenheim in Germany, Rouillier in France, and Tigerstedt in Finland. During the first world war he served in the Russian Imperial Red Cross as consulting surgeon and at the outbreak of the revolution in 1917 he was chief of the army ambulance service. In subsequent years he worked on the physiology of shock at Voronezh, to which the Russian university staff from Yuriev had been removed after the creation of the independent Estonian Republic. In 1924 he was called to Moscow to establish the first neuro-surgical institute, which he continued to direct till nearly the end of his life. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences, and president of the scientific medical council of the Commissariat of Public Health. He served as chairman of the Association of Russian Surgeons, and was the first president of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He had always taken a keen interest in the surgical services of the Red Army and went on active service at the outbreak of the German invasion in 1941. He was appointed chief surgeon to the army, and served in Leningrad during the siege. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin and created a Hero of Socialist Labour. He was at one time a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet. During the Anglo-American surgical mission to Russia in 1943 he was admitted to the Honorary Fellowship of the College, in a special ceremony at Moscow, by Surgeon Rear-Admiral Gordon Gordon-Taylor, FRCS. He was already in failing health and retired in 1945. He died on 11 November 1946, survived by his wife, two sisters, and a granddaughter. Burdenko was held in affectionate esteem by his staff and by successive pupils of his institute. He was a foreign member of the Académie de Chirurgie at Paris, a Fellow of the International College of Surgeons at Chicago, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. After his death three institutions were named "Burdenko" in his honour: the Surgical Clinic of the First Moscow Medical Institute, the Institute of Neurosurgery, and the Central Military Hospital.