Dr Aleksandar Sosberger - the first director of the City Hospital in Novi Sad

Abstract

The first director of the City Hospital in Novi Sad, which eventually grew into the modern Clinical Center of Vojvodina, was Dr Aleksandar-Sandor Sosberger, who was born in Novi Sad on September 13, 1873. He graduated on the Faculty of Medicine in Budapest, and then trained in hospitals in numerous European cities. The desire for learning and further training led him to specialize in the field of gynecology and obstetrics, and he became the first specialist gynecologist-obstetrician in Vojvodina. At the beginning of the 20th century, with the sudden increase in the number of inhabitants of Novi Sad, the existing hospitals were not sufficient for the hospitalization of the patients, thus the City Magistrate made a decision to build a new City Hospital in April 1907, the construction of which was completed in 1909, and then built facilities are units in which some clinics of the Clinical Center of Vojvodina are still located nowadays. It was organized in such a way that it had Internal Medicine, Surgical, Dermatology-Venereology and Gynecology-Obstetrics departments, with a bed capacity of about 300 beds. Recognizing his comprehensive education, experience, high expertise, intelligence and organizational skills, Dr Aleksandar Sosberger was appointed as the first manager of the newly built City Hospital. He was the first in the City Hospital to apply the Wasserman reaction, and he installed the first X-ray machine in Novi Sad, for his private practice. As the first gynecologist-obstetrician specialist in Vojvodina, he made a great contribution to the introduction and improvement of surgical techniques. Dr Aleksandar Sosberger showed that with dedicated professional work and responsibility, great results and improvements in the field of healthcare can be achieved, as evidenced by the fact that the City Hospital, over time, grew into a tertiary healthcare institution, the Clinical Center of Vojvodina.