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In the Polish written works of the seventeenth century we find quite opposite opinions on St. Bartholomew’s Day; on the one hand, the Paris massacre was approved in words which in the Poland of “golden age” no one would dare to utter, and on the other, the praises of tolerance, quite frequent in the period of Enlightenment, often contain condemnation of the massacre. It suffices to recall the opinion of Dymitr Michał Krajewski, who in 1784 wrote proudly: “it is nice to read the history of our nation. It is the history of the most peaceful nation in the world. There is no St. Bartholomew’s massacre, Sicilian Vespers, or subduing America”.
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The issue of antemurale is also discussed in my book “Polskie przedmurze chrześcijańskiej Europy: mity a rzeczywistość historyczna”. Considering that the work is devoid of critical apparatus due to the current stage in the process of its publication, it does not exhaustively discuss the history of the term, or the formation of its Polish and Latin equivalents (propugnaculum fidei christianae, scutum, clypeus, murus, munimentum or praesidium). I would therefore like to discuss this issue in the present article.
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Over thirty years ago Oskar Bartel, a distinguished scholar of the history of the Polish Reformation, bemoaned how little was known about the relations between preceptor Germaniae and the movement. In an article about the familiarity with Melanchthon, both as person and his oeuvre, in Poland, Bartel wrote: “wir besitzen einige Werke, meist Broschüren über Luther, Calvin, sogar Hus und Zwingli, aber ich habe keine über Melanchton gefunden”. Bartel’s article provided a recapitulation, if somewhat incomplete, of the state of research at the time, and essentially stopped at the death of the Reformer. Therefore, in this study I would like to point to the results of the last thirty years of research, on the one hand, and highlight the post-mortem impact of Melanchthon’s writings and the reflection of his person in the memories of the next generations, on the other.
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In his Satyr, or The Wild Man Jan Kochanowski refers to two old-time customs: first that, during the mass, at the reading of the Gospel, old Poles were to half draw their swords in token of their readiness to defend the Christian faith (vv. 185–200), and the second that infamists were punished upon their honour in such a way that when they sat at table with other people, the host cut the tablecloth to indicate that he did not want to share a meal with them (vv. 231–236). The article analyses numerous references to those customs in the old-Polish literature (unanimously attesting to the lack of these rituals in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries), to indicate that both were literary legends.
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Intensive archival and historical research conducted in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries led researchers to think that all Renaissance military treatises were recognized and their content was subjected to a detailed analysis. For this reason we can perceive the identification in the years 2009–2014 of the three manuscripts written by Albert of Hohenzollern as a sensational discovery. This article is aimed to provide researchers with new sources together with their brief description and to discuss the current state of knowledge on the origins and the further fate of these manuscripts.
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The object of this article is the contents of the notes of Elias Maior, a rector of St. Elizabeth’s gymnasium in Wrocław, made in the consecutive 1640–1669 Schreibkalenders. They constitute a rich source documenting everyday life of Wrocław’s humanistic elite. Of particular interest, among the rector’s accounts, are numerous references to music performed, both in public and in private domain.
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The Jan Laski Society of Lovers of The History of Polish Reformation in Vilnius, established in 1916, played a significant role in the propagation of history of the Reformation in Polish lands. It owed its achievements to the intensive efforts of its members who organized numerous meetings and lectures and published books on the Evangelical-Reformed Church and the influence the Reformation had on national culture and language. Towards the end of its existence the Society doubled the number of its members, which clearly shows that it was growing in prestige and popularity.
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First years after the Second World War were very difficult for the health care in Poland. The end of German occupation brought a wide range of challenges. They resulted from war damage, a significant loss of medical staff and a large scale of health risks. One of important goals of the health policy was to create the public health service available to all citizens. Initially, the restoration of the health care system was based on the model created in the interwar period. With time, along with political changes taking place in Poland, the transformation of the system began to adapt it to the centrally planned economy. The main part of this process ended in 1950. The new system was compatible with the Soviet model and was based on central and directive management which included all elements of the so-called “social health service”. The private medical practice was pushed to the margin and insurance health service was taken over by the state. The system built after the war, however, was still not widespread. Most of the rural population, which represented nearly half of the country`s population, were deprived of equal access to health care.
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In post-war Czechoslovakia, the re-organisation of public health care was closely linked to problems and new challenges in organising the academic education in medicine and medical science. Reforms in this area were seen as one of the basic starting points of health care reforms whose aim was to improve the health care and health of the population. Alongside elements such as the nationalisation of health care system, the system at this time focused not only on curative but also preventive medicine and hygiene. Similar trends were at that time in evidence in other countries of the then forming Soviet Bloc.In the early 1950s, medical faculties were in some countries of the Soviet Bloc (Poland, Hungary) removed from the structure of traditional universities and transformed into medical academies. These medical academies were supposed to take over the existing functions of academic faculties of medicine and provide teaching, research, and curative medicine, but newly also preventive care. In other countries (Czechoslovakia, GDR), medical faculties remained part of both the traditional and newly established universities, though their transformation into medical academies had also been discussed.The contribution includes: 1. a brief description of the network of academic medical education in 1945–1950s in countries of the Soviet Bloc (Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, GRD, Poland, and Hungary); 2. analysis of reasons why in Czechoslovakia the transformation of faculties into academies was not carried out, while in other countries it was. These reasons include references to the strength of tradition, factual arguments, or ideologically based argumentation pointing to “Soviet models”.
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Immediately after the war a discussion about the condition of the natural environment in Poland was held mainly in the specialist press that emphasised its degradation as especially dangerous for the society biologically and psychically wasted by experiences of the war. During the period of deStalinisation and political “thaw” after the 1956 October the subject of air and water pollution was more and more present in the press, but also in discussions of both the leaders of the state and some organised circles of the society. An increasingly well-known deteriorating state of the natural environment which adversely affected economic performance forced the government to search for remedies. As a result, new legal regulations were introduced with accompanying organisational changes. The most important of them were: the establishment of the Ministry of Navigation and Water Management (1957), Central Water Management Board (1960), and local structures responsible for the protection of waters from pollution, the introduction of the Water Law (1962), and the enactment of the Air Pollution Protection Act (1966). From 1960s on, systematic pollution tests of waters and air were carried on, which indicated that between 1967 and 1970 the condition of lakes and rivers deteriorated in comparison to the period of 1964–1967. In the same period there was an increased emission of greenhouse gases and reduced dust emissions. The main reasons for this were: the inefficacy of adopted laws (including a penalties system), insufficient financial investments in effective purification equipment, which was technologically outdated in its large part, the lack of qualified personnel specialised in environmental protection. There were, however, in the analysed period some elements of environmental awareness of people which were expressed, among other things, in letters sent by Polish citizens to the government.
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The article presents an analysis of the attitudes of the Polish society towards the degradation of an ecosystem occurring in three planes. Macro-scale actions are presented on the example of Chernobyl disaster and protests against the construction of nuclear power station at Żarnowiec. Afire in the Organika-Benzyl Chemical Plant and problems with the construction of a combined heat and power plant for the town of Kielce in the area of a natural reserve serve as examples of regional operations. Most numerous are examples for the local level, which include many initiatives of local municipal and rural communities. The issue of attitude of Polish people towards the pollution of natural environment in the country after the World War Two has been marginalised so far in the literature on the subject. It seems, however, that such an approach is wrong, and thorough studies in this field will certainly make a valuable contribution to the socio-economic history of the Polish People’s Republic.
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The main subject of research presented in the article are the ways of perceiving malicious tumour diseases by the society, medical community and the state authorities responsible for the health protection policy. The text brings up both the questions of registering and increasing cancer rates, and changing attitude of Polish people to oncologic care. On the basis of archival sources, both the press articles and narrative texts, the author outlines problems with the oncology education, extremely limited before the 1970s, and with popular social belief (and fears) related to cancerous diseases. An important element of the analyses are also limitations of the public health infrastructure of the contemporary People’s Poland and lines of the so-called “cancer policy” defined in the form of Governmental Programme against Cancerous Diseased (PR6) launched in 1976.
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The article is devoted to the subject of health and diseases in Silesia in 1945–1949 seen through the eyes of people. It was written on the basis of a seldom used historical source in the form of small advertisements published in the three Silesian dailies: Pionier, Słowo Polskie, and Dziennik Zachodni, which had the largest number of small advertisements and were the most popular source of information. This type of historical source makes it possible to gain valuable additional information about physicians, places of their practice, ways in which people dealt with diseases in the first extremely difficult years after the war. At the same time it gives the possibility to answer many questions and offers information that cannot be found anywhere in documents issued by the local or state administration.
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With the end of the Second World War, the feldsher’s profession was regulated by legal acts dating back to the interwar period. The leading act was the Act of 1 July 1921, on the feldsher’s profession, which briefly defined the feldsher’s qualifications. The key legal act regulating the legal position of feldsher was a law passed by the Legislative Sejm on 20 July 1950, on the feldsher’s profession. The feldsher’s powers were divided into two groups: activities performed independently (that is, in feldsher’s points and non-public health care institutions) as well as activities carried out non-independently – that is, under the guidance of a physician. The issues related to professional secrecy and disciplinary liability were regulated separately. Trying to determine the feldsher’s position in the system at that time, during the legislative work, it was recognized that it would be a profession between a doctor and a nurse. The reason for the adoption of such a solution was the possibility of performing small independent treatments, to whose performance a nurse was not authorized. Initially, the feldsher’s profession enjoyed the great interest of those willing to practice the profession. At this time, medical publications often presented the social advancement of feldsher school students, who continued their medical education after graduation. However, the interest in the feldsher’s profession gradually began to decline and the school year 1962/1963 was the last period of the feldsher’s education in Poland. The last feldsher school functioned then in Warsaw. From this moment on, the feldsher’s profession was left to its own devices. Since 1956, the feldsher’s qualifications have been extended to the possibility of working in sobering stations. Further powers were awarded to the feldsher in the 1960s, including issuing death certificates, diagnosing venereal diseases during medical examinations in sobering stations, and the inclusion of this profession in the fight against infectious diseases. In the case of the feldsher’s profession, the issues of a prestigious nature, such as the introduction of appropriate decorations similar to those of the physician or nurse, for instance long-term seniority, were also omitted. The feldsher’s profession was recalled when Poland entered the European Union structures, which led to the introduction of a new regulation in 2005 regulating the scope of activities to which the feldsher was qualified.
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In post-war Stalinist prisons and labour camps in Poland (to 1956) several diseases and ailments were treated with the help of the so-called folk or traditional medicine. Inmates, with all means at their disposal, tried to treat themselves as efficiently as possible, for example curing scabies with their own urine, a toothache and scurvy with garlic, or hyperacidity with chalk and lime scratched off walls. They could also soothe the itching in infestation with lice and ailments in furunculosis. But they could do nothing in the case of epidemic of typhus, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases. Only in 1945 ca. five thousand inmates went down with typhus. In the labour camp of Świętochłowice– Zgodna at least 1855 inmates died of diseases. Surgeons, feldshers, and other medical personnel were helpless in the face of diseases and epidemics in prisons and camps. Medical treatment, when it was possible, was hampered by dirt, insects, chronic shortages of food and medicines. This was further enhanced by a small number of hospital beds, but first of all by insufficient number of medical staff. Only a handful of surgeons decided to treat inmates.
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Józef Roman Rybicki has been remembered mainly as an outstanding activist of the Polish opposition underground and important member of the opposition, while his social and civic activities are mentioned much less frequently, despite the fact that his involvement in an anti-alcohol was very significant. Józef Rybicki engaged in anti-alcohol actions already in the 1930s. In later years he was more absorbed by different duties and problems. It was not until the mid-fifties that he was able return to this activity and soon afterwards he started to play an important role on the national scale. He established the Socio-Medical Commission at Pruszków, and at the same time began to work for the Social Anti-Alcohol Committee in Warsaw, where he quickly got promoted, acquiring, among other things, the position of deputy president of the Voivodeship Department of the Social AntiAlcohol Committee in Warsaw. In that capacity he contributed to the establishment of several institutions for detoxification treatment. He was also the head of the publishing and propaganda department of the Social Anti-Alcohol Committee; at the same time he cooperated with an elite periodical Walka z Alkoholizmem (Struggle against Alcoholism). He was the author of several texts (published in fragments or in full) about anti-alcohol actions and campaigns. In 1969 he left the Social Anti-Alcohol Committee but did not stop his anti-alcohol activities, as he was a member of the jury of various competitions in the field of anti-alcohol propaganda. He was also associated with the sobriety movement of the clergy which led to his appointment in 1972 to the Episcopal Commission for Sobriety. In the same year he was made a member of the Experts’ Team of the Permanent Commission at the Council of Ministers for the Struggle against Alcoholism. In that capacity he contributed to the publication in 1981 of the very first great report on problem of alcoholism in Poland.
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