Ladislav Král

“I spent my childhood in Říčany near Prague because my father was a state official. At first he worked at the customs office. He married Emílie from Petrovice, where I was also born. But then they lived in Říčany, where he worked as a supervisor of pension inspections. I lived there until I was seven because my father died of chronic leukaemia in 1928. Mum moved to her parents in Petrovice, that’s where I grew up afterwards.”

“The medical library in Hradec Králové naturally offered the complete Czech and Russian literature. Only occasionally did they have some important English magazine. But they were in such demand that it was almost impossible to get to them anyway. Western medicine was getting somewhat ahead of us. The Russian literature was rubbish, and also, it focused on a slightly different subject. It kept on about dysentery and Asian infections, which were of no interest to us. We couldn’t gain much from that. But they did occasionally touch on something from the English literature because at least some of the people there had [access to] it. But it got better in time.”

“During the Protectorate I was a farm hand. Mum had an acquaintance at the employment office in Kostelec, and the lady advised her against getting me employed as an office clerk for example. Because at the time I was already at risk of [being sent to] forced labour in a factory in the Reich. So I was a manual labourer and I worked for my grandfather. I also helped out at the town hall. The mayor always paid me a hundred crowns a month.”

“As a medic I practised under Professor Brtlík, a well-known children’s doctor at the children’s clinic in Prague. The building used to stand next to Nusel Bridge, but it’s been demolished since then. I was told to go to Liberec to the children’s clinic of the local regional hospital. I spent a year and a half there at the infection ward. I wanted to do paediatrics, but the hospital director Doctor Dub, when I was introducing myself, said: ‘Lad, I don’t have any free spot at the children’s ward. You’ll have to do pathology.’ But that wasn’t exactly the subject of my dreams. He offered me some other wards, and then said: ‘You wanted to do paediatrics, so go to the infection ward, there’s a free place there.’ The head doctor there was the excellent Doctor Hásek, he was a student of the renowned Professor Procházka from Bulovka Hospital. It was an enchanting period for me because he was so kind. He was always willing to give advice, he’d even come at night. I grasped the issue of infectious diseases there. Because the border region was full of newcomers, Slovaks, gypsies, who were often missing vaccination. All of the typical children’s infections that were fading out inland were rife there.”