Disputes, divisions and even conflicts, so frequent in Serbia, have not
bypassed physicians-members of the Serbian Medical Society; ones of the most
important occurred at the crossroad of the 19th and 20th centuries related
to foundation of the School of Medicine in Belgrade. The most prominent and
persistent advocate of foundation of the School of Medicine was Dr. Milan
Jovanovic Batut. In 1899, he presented the paper ?The Medical School of the
Serbian University?. Batut`s effort was worth serious attention but did not
produce fruit. On the contrary, Dr. Mihailo Petrovic criticized Batut by
opening the discussion ?Is the Medical School in Serbia the most acute
sanitary necessity or not?? in the Serbian Archives, in 1900. However, such
an attitude led to intervention of Dr. Djoka Nikolic, who defended Batut`s
views. He published his article in Janko Veselinovic`s magazine ?The Star?.
Since then up to 1904, all discussions about Medical School had stopped. It
was not even mentioned during the First Congress of Serbian Physicians and
Scientists. Nevertheless, at the very end of the gathering, a professor from
Prague, Dr. Jaromil Hvala claimed that ?the First Serbian Congress had
prepared the material for the future Medical School?, thus sending a message
to the attendants of what importance for Serbia its foundation would have
been. But the President of both the Congress and the Serbian Medical
Society, as well as the editor of the Serbian Archives, Dr. Jovan Danic
announced that ?the First Congress of Serbian Physicians and Scientists had
finished its work?. It was evident that Danic belonged to those medical
circles which jealously guarded special privileges of doctors and other
eminent persons who had very serious doctrinal disagreements on the
foundation of the Medical School. All that seemed to have grown into clash,
which finally resulted in the fact that Serbia got Higher Medical School
within the University of Belgrade with a great delay, only after the First
World War.
Medical Genetics in the Genomic Medicine of the 21st Century** This article is based on a talk given at the Symposium on the Future of Human and Medical Genetics, held in Seattle on May 19, 2004, in honor of the establishment of the Arno G. Motulsky Endowed Professorship at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
