Magdalena Paciorek

The article discusses the organization and activity of the rural health service in the mid-1960s in the light of the reports of the Supreme Audit Office. It is an attempt to answer the questions about the organization and availability of open healthcare in the field, whether the provincial community benefited from professional medical assistance to the same extent as the urban one? What were the problems of the then rural health service?

The article presents the sanitary condition of the Polish countryside at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s on the basis of press reports and bulletins of sanitary and epidemiological stations I will try to answer the questions to what extent and what intensity the higienization of villages in various regions of Poland developed of society to the introduced changes and finally what was the final effect of these struggles.

The article discusses the issue of the perception of the academic milieu of medical historians through the prism of the new post-war reality of the early 1950s. The author, based on the document – a report on a tour of scientifi c institutions by Dr. A. Smoluchowski – presents the then way of assessing medical historians, which to a large extent it depended on their individual views and attitude to the new Marxist ideology. In the end, the image of the community of Polish medical historians of the analyzed period turned out to be not the most interesting. It was supposed to be very confl icted, full of prejudices, blurring, disagreements, very attached to the pre-war way of practicing history, with little valuable achievements. How was it really? What could have been the cause of such an opinion? The author of the article tries to fi nd an answer to these and other questions.

The article relies on press reports of provincial doctors published in “Czasopismo Lekarskie” (“Medical Journal”) in the years 1899–1908, and reflects the concerns and problems of the then environment of rural and small-town doctors on the Polish lands. According to the reports, there were two groups of concerns: the first was gaining the trust of the rural people who, for various reasons, at the beginning of the 20th century preferred to get help from quacks, herbalists, healers, and barber-surgeons rather than to seek advice from ‘genuine doctors’. In the period under investigation, the provincial doctor ceased to be a ‘gentlemen’ doctor; thus, their material situation changed radically. The problem was not only numerous visits to distant villages or towns, constant readiness to provide assistance often in extreme situations or work in challenging conditions, but also issues of unfair competition, lack of solidarity between doctors, problems related to non-standardised medical fees, the issue of choosing medicaments (either cheap or expensive), or a great need for cyclical training. This problem was to be dealt with by regional medical societies. The doctor in the province needed to be a specialist in many fields of medicine. Showing incompetence towards a sick peasant was one of the reasons why doctors were losing their authority, but it also undermined confidence in contemporary medicine, thereby pushing the rural population into the hands of quacks and barber-surgeons.

The second issue, closely related to the first one, is the improvement of the provincial doctor’s self-image, which involved constant education and, above all, learning about the psychology and specificity of the behaviour of the rural people. In the press of the period, this topic was brought up by Władysław Biegański, Franciszek Grodecki, Teodor Dunin, Franciszek Wychowski, Antoni Kędzierski, Antoni Troczewski, Witold Chodźko, et al.

An independent Department of Science and Higher education at the KC PZPR was created in 1949 to take responsibility for all matters related to the development of science and higher education in the post-war Stalinist Poland. The department was responsible not only for the development of new solutions in the domain of science and higher education, but it also created reports on the entire process of education itself, the level of the ideological education of the students, the number of graduates etc. College faculty was another major area of interest. The surviving documentation consists of i.a. copies of various international trip request forms, reports from scientifi c conferences, memos describing the scientifi c community of a given college, as well as various types of complaints and denunciations. The article focuses mainly on the professors from the various medical colleges and aims at presenting a snapshot of the then-contemporary medical elite in the scientifi c domain as seen by Party offi cials. To what extent was the presented image distorted and what was the reason for its creation? – those are only some of the questions that the article tries to answer.

In a post-war reality, especially in the early 1950s, the issue of conducting medical history research in Poland was the subject of factual analysis. The Marxist-Leninist ideology enforced by the then-contemporary state authorities demanded such an approach. A special Medical Sciences History Committee was established on 18.01.1952 at the request of the Science Council of the Ministry of Health. It was located on Chocimska 22 street in Warsaw and was given the task to ‘Rebuild the history of medicine based on a new foundation’. Minutes from the sessions of the Committee and the discussed topics were recorded in a file kept by the Ministry of Health that was found in the Archives of Modern Records. The following topic is indeed worthy of investigation, as it was that Committee that gave rise to the shaping of history of medical sciences according to new rules of the post-war period. The Ministry of Health had received regular reports on the sessions of the Committee and the topics discussed.