Object of the Month: March 2022 Reader, Beware: Books Not Licked Do Not Transmit TB “To be pasted on the inside cover of a borrowed book! Reader, beware! (1) The borrower provides a clean paper cover for the borrowed book. (2) In the interest of public health, every reader is requested to report any infectious disease in the […]

  Object of the Month: February 2022 Fan-shaped Spatula When the abdominal cavity is open by incision (laparotomy) for ileus surgery or Caesarian section, intra-abdominal pressure may rise, pushing intestinal loops into the cut, preventing suture. An assistant, if available, can compress the intestine by hand, the surgeon may use a wide spatula. Both hand and […]

Object of the Month: December 2021 “Vaccination Protects my Life”: Vilibald Weinzett, 1954   The matchbox sticker featuring a – perhaps – smiling child was published in 1954 by the SOLO factory in the Moravian town of Lipník nad Bečvou and conceived by the Research Institute of Health Education in Prague. The factory, founded in 1908, […]

Object of the Month: November 2021 A Charm Against Tuberculosis? Robert Koch, the discoverer of TBC-bacillus and the founder of bacteriology, became a heroic figure both in literature – in Czechoslovakia, in Karel Driml’s Bacilinek puppet play – and in the visual arts at the turn of the 20 century. The portrait of the Berlin […]

Object of the Month: October 2021 Hospital Lung Ventilator KPT-N In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Czechoslovak automatic pulmonary ventilators were being developed in the Presna mechanika (Prema, Precise Mechanics) factory in Brno by a team led by ing. Jaromír Bernreiter (1916-1966). Dr. Hugo Keszler (1916-1994), the head of anaesthesiology at the Clinical and Experimental […]

Object of the Month: September 2021 Urotropin The many medicines and chemicals tested to treat patients during the „Spanish Flu“ epidemic of 1918-1919 included newly developed chemotherapeutics. Prominent among them was urotropin (hexamethylenetetramine, hexenamin), tablets carried by many soldiers in their battle dress pockets, whether as solid fuel for warming rations or as prevention and […]

Object of the Month: August 2021 Pneumothorax After Küss, Waldek and Wagner, Prague, around 1925 The BCG (bacillus Calmette-Guérin) tuberculosis vaccine was introduced to medical practice in the 1920s. Only in the 1940s were antibiotics employed to cure the disease: beginning with a combination of streptomycin, para-aminosalicylic acid and isoniazid. In previous decades, physicians treated tuberculosis […]