A qualified healthcare in the northen part of Trencin county was still in the early 19th century for the general population rather difficult to reach. Large catchment area has been formerly managed with only a few trained doctors. With working in the field helped them healer‐surgeons, pharmacists, childbirth babice and military sawbones. Nevertheless was qualified healthcare for the population mostly too expensive and searched it as a last resort. Mostly they relied on herbalism, folk medicine, and men producing medicated oil. The population at that time was bothering a variety of different diseases, while many of which ended in death. The situation has slowly improved over time, the number of doctors and hence their availability raised progressively. Nevertheless, also in this period epidemics of certain diseases decimated the population. Most difficult in this respect was an epidemic of cholera. However, the society began to worry even some new health problems, among which can be included at that time increasing dependence on alcoholic beverages.
W Archiwum Polskiej Akademii Nauk - Oddział w Poznaniu przechowywana jest paczka poufnych dokumentów prof. Adama Wrzoska, wybitnego lekarza, antropologa, historyka i filozofa medycyny, organizatora szkolnictwa wyższego w międzywojennej Polsce i pierwszego dziekana Wydziału Lekarskiego Uniwersytetu Poznańskiego. Zastrzeżenie poufności wygasło z końcem lutego 2015 r. Najciekawszym dokumentem w tej kolekcji okazał się pamiętnik Adama Wrzoska, opublikowany w niniejszym numerze czasopisma "Acta Medicorum Polonorum".
EN
For fifty years some secret documents concerning Prof. Adam Wrzosek (1875-1965), the outstanding doctor, anthropologist, medical historian and philosopher, organizer of higher education in the inter-war Poland, and the first dean of the Medical Faculty of the University in Poznań, are kept in the Poznań Department of the Archive of Polish Academy of Sciences. They could be available only fifty years after Prof. Wrzosek's death. This clause was fulfilled at the end of February 2015. The most interesting document from this collection is a manuscript of Wrzosek's memoirs, which is elaborated and published in this issue of the journal.
This paper contains outcomes of an analysis, which is based on a document preserved in the National Archive in the Old Manipulation Collection (the “Established Order”, [1680]). It is a manuscript draft of a plague regulation for the Kingdom of Bohemia, which has survived in three languages. The likely background of the emergence and origin of the “Established Order” is clarified in comparison with other normative sources published by the initiative of state (provincial) authorities in Central Europe at the turn of the 1670s and 1680s in a fight against the plague. Compared with the existing research where the model of the “Established Order” is attributed to the Viennese infection rules of 1679, the current research represents a different view on this issue. In addition to the two mentioned orders (the Bohemian “Established Order” and the Viennese Infection Order), the paper pays special attention to the 1679 Infection Order and the Silesian “Neue Infections-Ordnung”, which was issued in print in Wrocław in 1680. Issues connected with reception of normative texts across the lands and throughout the linguistic milieus will be further mentioned on an example of Silesian and Moravian infection orders issued in the early 18th century, but with a strong relation to documents issued in the second half of the 17th century.
The State School of Hygiene (SSH) was opened in Warsaw in 1926, whose creation was possible thanks to financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Also owing to the Foundation’s help, in mid-thirties the Institute of Mental Hygiene (IMH) was launched. Both institutions were integrated within the structure of the National Institute of Hygiene. The purpose they were trying to successfully fulfill was to train a team of experts necessary for the national healthcare (SSH), diagnostic-medical and educational activity, as well as educational-propaganda and scientific-research work in the scope of mental health hygiene (IMH).
The present paper deals with the category of so-called apparent death which is closely connected with the history of medicine of the second half of the 18th century. Present-day European historiographical research shows that at the latest in the 1740s the leaders of medical discourse began to be concerned with the temporal status of biological death. The central question was how to determine conclusively that death had occurred, which permitted the burial of the dead person. Yet this was also a time when people became more concerned with the possibility that individuals might not have died and could recover by themselves. The more modern medicine progressed, however, the more people listened to anecdotal evidence about apparent deaths and premature burials. During the second half of the 18th century this originally medical issue crossed the boundaries of scholarly discourse, among other things, as a result of medical treatises being published in national languages, and became a real nightmare of the Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century poets such as Edgar Allen Poe explored this topic in great depth, starting from the assumption that people generally feared being buried while being still alive.