ZDRAVSTVENO-PROSVJETITELJSKI RAD DOKTORA LOVRE DOJMIJA NA PODRUČJU HERCEGOVINE

Abstract

Dr Lovro Dojmi worked in Herzegovina between the two world wars and was a great supporter of Dr Andrija Štampar’s ideas about social medicine. During his stay in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was the head of the People’s Healthcare Centre (1931-1943) and taught practical hygiene at the local grammar school. Dr Dojmi was born on the island of Vis, Croatia in 1899. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Padova in 1924. In 1925, he started general practice in Dubrovnik. A year later he became assistant at the Surgery Hospital in Sarajevo and in 1928 a staff member of the Sarajevo Institute of Hygiene. He coordinated the health team fighting a syphillis outbreak in Tuzla in 1929. He was later the head of the Public Healthcare Centre in Livno, Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 25 January 1931 Dr Dojmi came to Mostar to work as a schoolchildren physician This article presents the work of Dr Dojmi in health education through his publications, organizing lectures, teaching health professionals how to prevent tuberculosis and syphilis and how to introduce healthy diet and hygiene to the households. In a park near the heathcare centre where he worked he was breeding Gambusia affinis, a particular fish species which he brought from Italy. These fish are known to eat mosquito larvae and thus help to fight malaria. This was the time before insecticides and antibiotics, and malaria was rather common in Herzegovina. The idea of this article is to give a better insight into Dr Dojmi’s work, relying mostly on his unpublished monograph My Health Teaching Experience that was given to the author of this article as a present.