Projekt gradnje vojne zarazne bolnice u Brodu na Savi za Prvoga svjetskoga rata
The project of the construction of the military isolation hospital in Brod na Savi during World War I

Summary/Abstract: The article examines the preparations for the building of the big isolation hospital in Brod na Savi made during World War I, attempting to shed some light on certain less known details from the history of the town whose calamities in the war were largely a result of its geostrategic position. The military authorities started planning the erection of the military isolation hospital in Brod na Savi in 1915 because infectious diseases had troubled them greatly almost from the beginning of World War I. In spite of the necessity, the project of the hospital’s construction was not carried out during the war because this and similar projects were suspended after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy even though the need for the planned institutions had not grown any less. According to what we have found out so far, only the preparatory administrative tasks were completed for the isolation hospital in Brod and the construction was possible within the next year or two. This may seem very strange from the present perspective, but the complicated administrative and construction procedure was followed in detail in spite of the war, even though it caused the construction process to proceed very slowly even at times of peace, and let alone at times of war and shortage of qualified workforce caused by the fact that most of the men were mobilized. Thus the Monarchy’s proverbially slow administration was made even slower, to which the preserved documents about the hospital’s construction attest very well. An analysis of the military hospital’s location yields several conclusions resulting from health regulations. The hospital was going to be located beside the railway line at the town’s eastern entrance, before the narrow town area, since most of the infected soldiers were coming from the Serbian front. A junction with the main road leading to Osijek enabled easy transport of patients to the hospital and easy transport of convalescents deeper into Slavonia’s interior, depending on the circumstances and needs. All of this had to proceed as far away from the town center as possible, and that had been the plan, since the hospital was supposed to be located even farther away than the slaughterhouse (see Appendix III), which the regulations required to be built in a secluded location. In addition, the wastewaters flowed into the stream running through an uninhabited area and joining the river Sava downstream from Brod na Savi, thus considerably reducing the possibility that the civilian population might get infected (see Appendix II). The failure to build the big military isolation hospital was disadvantageous to the improvement of the health situation in the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia, since the attempt at concentrating infected patients in one place fell through.

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