The Public Health Centre in Osijek – Štampar’s Idea Put into Practice

Abstract

The great commitment of Andrija Štampar in the 1920s and 1930s paved the way for the reorganisation and improvement of the public health service. His ideas about the necessity of founding and opening public health centres and stations throughout the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) played a very important role in these efforts. The opening of the Public Health Centre in Osijek, which encompassed numerous services including a dispensary and anti-epidemic service, secured a higher quality of healthcare for the local population. The Public Health Centre functioned fully in accordance with the then programme of social medicine advocated by Štampar, who resided in Osijek several times before 1930. The newly opened Public Health Centre included a city and school polyclinic; a sanitary inspection service; an anti-TB, skin, and venereal diseases dispensary; an anti-trachoma and anti-rabies station; a children’s dispensary; a dental department; and a Hygiene Institute, while the experimental animals necessary for the working of the institute’s bacteriological laboratory were kept – until the construction of a dedicated outbuilding (in 1958/59) – in an outbuilding located next to the building housing the Neurology Department today (part of the Osijek General Hospital).