He was born on June 3, 1876 in the village of Kamenka, Nizhnelomovsky district of Penza province in a poor family. He studied at Kamensk primary school. In 1904, at the height of the Russian-Japanese war (1904-1905), he volunteered for a medical team, and, under fire, carried out the wounded from the battlefield. He participated in the suppression of outbreaks of typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever. In 1906, the medical faculty of the University of Yuriev (Tartu) awarded Burdenko the diploma of "Doctor with Honors". Like many students, Burdenko shared the revolutionary mood of the time, participated in gatherings and demonstrations. In 1909, he defended his dissertation and in 1910 held the position of assistant professor of the Department of Surgery at his university. Since 1917, Burdenko has been an ordinary professor at the faculty surgical clinic. At the beginning of the First World War, he worked as a consultant surgeon for various fronts of the active army, participated in the creation of field hospitals and dressing and evacuation centers, and operated on the wounded. Burdenko drew up the first Provision on the Military Health Service of the Red Army; he took care of the necessary medicines and equipment for military doctors. In 1924, he became the superintendent of the surgical clinic of Moscow State University, and in 1929 - the superintendent of the neurosurgical clinic at the X-Ray Institute, on the basis of which the Central Neurosurgical Institute (now the Burdenko Institute of neurosurgery in Moscow) was established in 1934. In the first days of the Great Patriotic War, Burdenko was appointed chief surgeon of the Red Army and personally inspected hospitals. The collected material formed the basis of his teaching on battle wounds. Being at the head of the team of doctors, he tested and introduced new drugs for wide use in frontline hospitals: streptocide, sulfidine, penicillin. In 1939, Burdenko became an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1941, when crossing the Neva river, Burdenko was bombed and suffered a concussion. After returning from the war, he continued to work, but as a result of his concussion, he suffered two consecutive brain hemorrhages, and in the summer of 1946, a third. He died on November 11, 1946 in Moscow.