Andrija Štampar: Founder of the Yugoslav Public Health Service and Yugoslav ambassador to the WHO

Andrija Štampar was born in 1888 in the village of Brodski Drenovac in Slavonia, and died in 1958 in Zagreb. He was a Yugoslav and Croatian doctor and scientist most deserving of founding public health and social medicine in the Balkans in the first half of the 20th century. He graduated from the Medical Faculty in Vienna in 1911 with a doctorate in general medicine. Even as a medical student, he wrote articles and pamphlets with the goal of educating and enlightening people about prevention and maintaining health. He began his professional career working as a municipal doctor in Nova Gradiška, and from 1919 to 1930 he worked as the head of the hygiene department of the Ministry of Public Health in Belgrade, and in that period he worked on founding a health service in the former Yugoslavia. He organized more than 250 public institutions important for health work. With his dedicated and tireless work, he tried to establish a doctor as a public and social worker and a national teacher and educator, who is economically independent and equally accessible to all strata of society. He emphasized the importance of preventive medical work. From 1930, his more significant engagement at the international level began. He works as a hygiene expert at the League of Nations in many European countries, in the USA and in China, where he is credited with the reform of the health service. He spent the years of World War II as a detainee in a prison in Graz. After his release, he continued to work in the field of public health and science, as the director of the School of Public Health, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, rector of the University of Zagreb, member and president of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts JANU (1947-1958). Along with a rich professional career in the country, he achieves notable successes in the organization of the public health service and in the world. He has been working on the founding of the World Health Organization since 1946, and after writing its constitution in the summer of 1948, he chaired the first Assembly of this highest health body in the world in Geneva.