Personal hygiene and public health care in the Polish countryside after 1945 – propaganda against reality
Personal hygiene and public health care in the Polish countryside after 1945 – propaganda against reality

Summary/Abstract: In a new post-war model of the state healthcare system the only group that stayed on its margin until the 1970s were individual farmers. Leaving the peasants outside the system of free medical care and thus forcing adult members of this class to pay high costs of treatment of common at that time medical maladies (such as, for example, tuberculosis) was in the 1950s one of the forms of oppressive Stalinist policy. In fact, however, such a situation was forced mainly by economic, personnel, and organisational malfunction of the reconstructed state.Institutions of medical care that reached the countryside or were established there in the 1950s, provided free medical coverage only for children and pregnant women. A rapidly growing social mobility of the Polish countryside generated by the post-war revamping of social and ownership structure was becoming an increasingly important factor supporting modernisation actions of the central authorities. The purpose of the present study is to outline the scale of medical and health problems in the Polish countryside immediately after the war. Treating this period as a peculiar starting point, I also make an attempt to characterise directions and pace of changes occurring in the everyday health life of the Polish country to the 1970s.

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