Operational practices in the private archive of Branko Cvjetanović, an associate of Andrija Štampar

Abstract

This paper is based on previously unexamined archival material related to the work of Branko Cvjetanović, one of the key figures in Croatian and global epidemiology in the second half of the 20th century. Rather than offering a conventional biographical or historiographical reconstruction, the study approaches the archive as an autonomous source of knowledge, understood as a material, visual, and administrative trace of professional activity, institutional relations, and everyday practices of public health. Treating the archive as an active epistemic space rather than a passive repository of facts, the paper analyses photographs, documents, working records, and contextual artefacts produced during epidemiological fieldwork and within health institutions. Special emphasis is placed on the »working life« of science: field operations, the organisation and implementation of public health campaigns, visual documentation of disease, population, and infrastructure as well as administrative procedures that shaped the production and application of epidemiological knowledge. In this respect, the archive is understood as a dynamic system in which scientific practice unfolds through operational, logistical, and communicative processes that extend beyond the framework of formal publications. The analysis demonstrates that professional authority and scientific legitimacy are constituted not only through scientific publications, but also through everyday practices, bureaucratic routines, and visual strategies of recording and managing health risks. More broadly, the paper considers the archive as a medium that provides insight into the relationships between science, the state, and society, particularly within the context of socialist and post-socialist public health systems. In this way, the archive of Branko Cvjetanović is interpreted not only as documentation of an individual professional career, but also as a valuable source for examining the institutional culture of public health and the ways in which scientific knowledge is operationalised in social practice.