Reconstructive surgery has a long way to go. In Europe, Dominique Jean Larrey surgeon, humanist and innovator wrote a very interesting card in this area. In addition to practical actions often taken on the battlefields of the Napoleonic era, he devoted a signifi ant part of his scientifi c achievements to the problems of maxillofacial surgery, also educating his students in this direction. And here is a handful of messages from over two hundred years ago.

Casten Rönnow, coming from a Swedish family with medical traditions, spent the most active years of his professional career at the court of King Stanislaus in Lunéville. He studied in Stockholm and Uppsala and continued his education abroad in Denmark, Germany, and finally in France, in Paris. He received his surgeon  diploma at the University of Metz in 1730. He was a very promising surgeon in Parisian circles, with a noticeable artistic talent which he used while illustrating a treaty of a well-known military surgeon, Henri-François Le Dran. In France he joined the court of a Polish queen, Katarzyna Opalińska (the wife of King Stanislaus Leszczyński), who sent him to Konnigsberg as a trustworthy, personal doctor of King Stanisław Leszczyński. He stayed with the monarch till his death in 1766, exercising the function of “Médecin Conseiller in time du roi”, but in fact, he was also the court doctor. He was called to assist in particularly diffi cult cases like birth fever of Mme du Châtelet or the first documented autopsy in the history of medicine performed on a dwarf, Bébé. Casten Rönnow was also a medical supervisor in the duchy of Lorraine and Bar, he participated in the establishment of the Collège Royale de medicine in Nancy, published scientifi c works. In 1744, he became a member of the Académie royale des sciences in Sweden, and after the death of King Stanislaus, when he came back from Sweden, he became the manager of this institution, opening in this way the next and the last chapter in his life.

The paper comments the Gdańsk/Danzig Hebammen-Ordnung issued in 1781 by the Naturforschende Gesellschaft and presents a scholarly edition of its appendixes. The Danzig Research Society was established in 1743, and in the late 70’s of the 18th century, at the height of popular and medical enlightenment (Volks- und medizinische Aufklärung), it engaged itself in making improvements in local healthcare system. One of the planned effects of numerous activities of the Society in the above mentioned context was both reform and development of local midwif ery, among others creation of a position of the Hebammen-Meiste and establishing a list-of-duties for Danzig sworn midwives and their instructor (respectively supervisor).

„Lekarz Wojskowy” journal was established in the year of 1920. Its main purpose was the popularization of actual standards of medical knowledge among military physicians who graduated from universities of Russia, Prussia and Austro- Hungarian Empire before the First World War. This standard should be used by them in practice and popularized among conscripts. The main goal of the paper is to describe a history of the journal and showing examples of medical knowledge popularization especially that considered social diseases (STD and tuberculosis), infections which caused digestive system diseases and rational dietetical rules at both quantitative and qualitative aspect. These matters were very important for health care of the army and Polish civilians also because infectious diseases risks and unhealthy diet applied also for them. Medical knowledge popularization among soldiers and conscripts was aimed at improving health condition of whole Polish population.

A history of the concentration camps is related with huge hunger. It was a hunger that was constantly in the psyche and managed the life of the prisoners. Food rations were calculated to let the prisoner survive in the camp for a maximum three months.
The food was monotonous and defective. Based on the memories of the prisoners and reports of the Soviet Commission, it is known that the food was prepared from the worst quality of products, e.g. bread was on the basis of fl our mixed with sawdust, what totally changed the structure, the loaf was clayey, often moldy, and that was the main cause of bloody diarrhea, cheese or marmalade were contaminated or spoiled, the same situation was with the other products. Prisoners tried to fi ght for each additional portion of food. Prisoners stole food, and that was severely punished – in many cases food was taken away for few days, what accelerated their encounter with death.
As a result of prolonged hunger, the body has undergone irreversible changes.The first stage of the disease is a state of nutritional deficiency, which is mainly characterized by losing weight, because the body uses its own fat stores (so called compensation). The second stage is hunger. The body exhausts its own nutritional and energy reserves, and after using them consumes protein bodies, causing tissue damage.
In my article, I would like to explain how hunger affected the body. What happened to organism? What happened to the psyche? Which group of prisoners was the most vulnerable to the destruction of the body? The analysis is based on the source material kept in the Archives of Museum Stutthof in Sztutowo and specialist literature.

Doctor Jan Roch Raum (1854–1918) was a surgeon from Warsaw who most of his professional life was associated with the Przemienienie Pańskie Hospital, where he was the Chief Physician. He left behind a small archival legacy, kept in the collection “Zbiór Jana Rauma”, 72/1275, 1859–1923. The analysis of these documents,  and others records of different provenance, is an attempt to present this figure from a different perspective than the official biographies. It allows to get to know his family, his career, and the bright and dark sides of the doctor’s life, like letters from grateful patients, complaints of the families of the victims of medical errors and the  course of disciplinary proceedings. These documents are also a great source for researching the history of the Przemienienie Pańskie Hospital in Warsaw.