Abstract

This article revisits the contested early history of phytoncides within Soviet bioscience through the work of Boris P. Tokin. It traces the concept’s evolution from incidental observations in 1928–1930—yeast death near crushed onion during experiments on Gurvich’s “mitogenetic rays”—to Tokin’s 1932 realization, catalyzed in Tashkent, that volatile plant emissions can exert bactericidal and fungicidal effects on pathogens. The formal codification and naming of “phytoncides” in 1942, amid wartime shortages of antiseptics, accelerated clinical trials and hospital use, helped seed the term “phytoncidotherapy,” and intersected with the emergence of domestic aromatherapy. The paper clarifies frequent biographical inaccuracies (e.g., Tokin’s birthplace in Grushevka; his moves and appointments; the 1945 relocation to Leningrad) and situates his work within institutional and political contexts, including repression in 1937–1939 and the subsequent development of the Kyiv school under V. G. Drobotko. It also examines the term’s dual etymology—its widely taught Greco-Latin derivation and an unofficial acronymic reading linked to Filatova, Tokin, and Nebolyubova—and documents Tokin’s conceptual broadening (by 1964) from essential oils to a wider class of volatile and non-volatile plant substances produced by both wounded and healthy tissues. Rather than fix a single “discovery date,” the article argues that novelty lies in establishing a general plant antimicrobial system that transcends essential oils, thereby reframing the origins of phytoncidotherapy and underscoring Tokin’s underrecognized role in the history of aromatherapy.