Some of the contemporary achievements in the Polish medical field today can be traced back to a historical list of Nobel Prize-winning researchers who also achieved careers as ministers or practiced as authors, pianists, art collectors or therapists. We have selected five stories which illustrate the enormous Polish contribution to the world of medicine.

Recently, figures of medical genius have regained public exposure with Łukasz Palkowski’s internationally praised film, Gods / Bogowie (2014) -- a biopic about Polish cardiologist Zbigniew Religa, who led the team of surgeons that performed the first successful heart transplant in the Polish People’s Republic. Bogowie has had over a million viewers worldwide. As the fundamental professional duty of saving lives touches upon the limits of morality in light of constant scientific advancement, the Polish medical field has produced figures with wide-ranging interests, not only in medicine, but also in politics, the humanities and the arts.

Koprowski: The Case of Polio

The first effective vaccine against the post-war epidemic of polio was invented by the Warsaw-born virologist and immunologist Dr. Hilary Koprowski. Recognized for his curiously distinct personality throughout his career in the U.S., Koprowski was a graduate of Warsaw University’s medical department as well as the Warsaw Conservatory and the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. Throughout his medical career Koprowski remained an avid pianist, a collector of paintings of the old masters, and a polyglot who spoke seven languages. After his recent death in 2013, Koprowski’s name was remembered as one of the world’s foremost biomedical researchers, however, his groundbreaking discovery did not always receive the recognition it deserved.

Dr. Koprowski developed an effective polio vaccine and registered it under his name in 1948, before doctors Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin (who, as luck would have it, was also of Polish origin) received accreditation for their concurrent research. Nevertheless, Koprowski remained a forgotten figure of the trilogy of great virologists of the 50s. Koprowski’s vaccine was used with good results at research sites in various countries; excluding the United States, as Americans feared the potential side-effects of a vaccine based on a live virus - instead of a “killed” version - which was later developed by Salk and released in 1955 in injection form, while an “attenuated” version (reduced in virulence) was developed in oral form by Sabin around the same year. While Salk is regarded as the world's deliverer from polio in the American popular consciousness, thanks to its cheaper production and distribution, Sabin’s oral vaccine allowed for the hope that the epidemic may one day be eradicated worldwide. Among the three of them, Koprowski’s name remained forgotten for a long while, but it also illuminated the delicate balance between risk and recognition, as well as the convergence of medicine and politics in the development of a drug that can save thousands of children from infection.

Numerous other politically-involved cases in the history of Polish vaccine research are worth recognition: Polish biologist Dr. Rudolf Stefan Weigl is regarded as the inventor of the first effective vaccine against typhus. Weigl, who is known to have employed and protected Polish intellectuals during WWII, made his vaccines available inside ghettos in Lviv and Warsaw, saving countless lives. On a similar venture, Dr. Eugeniusz Lazowski along with Dr. Stanisław Matulewicz caused a “fake” epidemic by injecting a typhus vaccine into the non-Jewish population in neighborhoods surrounding the Jewish ghettos, causing Germans to abandon the area, thus sparing thousands of local Jews’ lives. Today, human testing of a prostate cancer vaccine is being carried out in eight different European countries by a German-Polish medical team under Dr. Mariola Fotin-Mleczek’s supervision.

Szczeklik and The Kraków-effect

As the historical city of master painter Jan Matejko, Kraków’s artistic and architectural flavours seem to have inspired those from the medical field and turned them into novelists and theatre actors. To name it the “Kraków-effect” wouldn’t be an overstatement, especially in the case of two figures. Polish immunologist Prof. Andrzej Szczeklik was not only involved in the discovery of prostacyclin (a hormone produced in the lining of the arteries, and helped understand the uses of aspirin) alongside another Kraków-based pharmacologist Ryszard Jerzy Gryglewski at John Vane’s London laboratory in 1976, but he was also praised as a novelist. Szczeklik’s recent book, Kore: On Sickness and the Sick and the Search for the Soul of Medicine (Znak, 2007), was published a little before his death in 2012. A previous work, Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine (2005), translated into several languages from the Polish original with a foreword by prominent Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, reflects Prof. Sczczeklik’s main source of inspiration after the Greek term, catharsis; cleansing of the body by medicine and the soul by art.

...Science is just one way of learning about reality... Plato knew this, and as he came near the limits of scientific learning, he turned to poetry... Through poetic metaphors, through art, he captured truths that were inaccessible to science. But what, we might ask, is the “truth”? “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors,” replies Nietzsche. If this truth about the truth is true, then the circle closes, art meets up with science, and the doctor finds his place at the point where they connect (Catharsis, 53-54)

Another associate of the internationally renowned School of Medicine at the Jagiellonian University, Julian Aleksandrowicz, also known as the father of Polish psychosomatics, has focused on developing ecological methods of preventing leukaemia and most importantly, psychotherapeutic and theatrically engaging methods of healing somatic diseases - in which mental factors play a significant role in the development or resolution of a physical illness. Serving as a physician of the Polish resistance during the war under the pseudonym “Doktor Twardy”, Aleksandrowicz focused on practicing theatrical therapy with his patients. His numerous publications cover topics ranging from ecological consciousness to the experimental convergence of the kitchen and medicine.