Ilya Mechnikov is a Russian biologist, a great scientist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. One of the founders of comparative pathology and domestic microbiology, immunology, the creator of the doctrine of phagocytosis and the theory of immunity. The proposed publication includes not only articles by the scientist in which he talks about his medical practice, but also articles devoted to the problem of finding the meaning of human life. According to the scientist, the main task of medicine today is to “extend life until the moment of satiety with it and the feeling of the need for non-existence.”