Social Hygiene and Social Medicine in Interwar Czechoslovakia with the 13th District of the City of Prague as Its Laboratory

n the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938) the main focal points for social access to medicine were the external activities of medical and social workers, operating outside the framework of the traditional curative institutions. It was hoped that the interconnection between curative and preventative medical care consequent on the creation of such institutions would ensure unity, and enable society to cope efficiently with the demographic disaster caused by the First World War and later exacerbated by the economic depression in the 1920s/1930s. In the modern era – at the time of democratisation and collectivisation of the productive and social life – neither the conventional work of family doctors nor the activities of traditional hospitals could cope adequately with social illnesses. They could not keep up to date with discoveries of science and make efficient use of them. I