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The Austrian emperor and the Croat-Hungarian king Franz Joseph I (1830/1848-1916) was the longest-serving ruler of the Habsburg dynasty. Among his properties was Osijek, which since 1809 enjoyed the status of a free royal city. In the period under review, it was the seat of the Virovitica County and the capital of the Kingdom of Slavonia until its incorporation into the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia after the Croat-Hungarian settlement of 1868. Because of this, Osijek was not only a political, economic and cultural centre but also a health care centre. At the beginning of the reign of Franz Joseph I, two hospitals were operating in it: a military one in the baroque military garrison Tvrđa and a civilian one in New Town. The most significant role in the further development of the Osijek and Slavonian health care was played by the trust established in 1806 from the legacies of innkeeper Johann Kolhoffer, tanner Josef Huttler and Jesuit Cristian Monsperger. Although originally intended for the establishment of an orphanage, due to a number of unfavourable political circumstances, the trust, until then with multiple interests attributed to the principal, came under the administration of the city of Osijek only in 1867. Along with the new orphanage opened in 1874, a new hospital was completed as well in 1868, also with the money from the trust. Huttler-Kohlhoffer-Monsperger Foundation Hospital was the largest and most modern hospital in the Triune Kingdom, and despite later constructions of various hospital wards, its building has remained the most representative building within the Clinical-Hospital Centre Osijek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ibn Sina, better known to the Western medical historians by his Latin nickname Avicenna, is considered the third most important physician in medical history, along with the Greek physician Hippocrates and the Roman physician Galen. He was born around 980 in Afshona near Bukhara on the Silk Road in present-day Uzbekistan and died in 1037 in Hamadan near Tehran in present-day Iran. Among his greatest contributions to the development of medicine is his work entitled The Canon of Medicine, in which he summarized all the previous medical knowledge, which is why it has been used for centuries as a basic medical textbook. In recent times, in connection with the controversy over the naming of the medieval caliphate medicine, with the aim of formulating an inclusive term, which would not emphasize any involved group to the detriment of the others, paradoxically in the focus of the research of the in it interested historians of medicine, instead of the achievements of the individual doctors from the mentioned era, came the determination of their ethnic and religious affiliation, including Avicenna’s, all the more so because he came from the disputed area of the conflicts between different nations and opposing religions. In doing so, scientific discussions are increasingly joined by the erection of the representative architectural structures in the places related to the individual doctors, one of which is the representative Avicenna Museum in Afshona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although stethoscope was invented by French physician René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) in 1816, its wider clinical application started only after the publication of his book entitled De l'Auscultation Médiate ou Traité, du Diagnostic des Maladies des Poumons et du Coeur in 1819. Its invention coincided with the development of the 'hospital medicine' in the post-revolutionary Paris during the first quarter of the 19th century. It has enabled then contemporary physicians to explain the correlation between the patient symptoms and the clinical findings and thus has helped the shift from the humoral pathology towards the solitary pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the differences between English and Croatian views of early modem medicine through the respective Renaissance plays. As Renaissance made no particular distinction between arts and sciences, plays of that time provide a very common source of medical narrative. During Renaissance both languages produced high literary achievements, which makes them exemplars among their Germanic and Slavic counterparts, and justifies this comparison, regardless of their significant differences. One should bear in mind that while England was a unified kingdom, with London as the major cultural centre, Croatia's division among the neighbouring powers produced several prominent cultural centres such as Zadar, Šibenik, Split, Hvar, Korčula, and the most important one, Dubrovnik. One should also bear in mind that the golden age of Croatian Renaissance plays had finished as early as 1567 with the death of Marin Držić, before it even started in England with the foundation of the first permanent theatrical companies in 1576. Along these lines, this paper compares their early modern attitudes toward medicine in general and men and women practitioners in particular. In this respect, it evaluates the influences of the origin, patronage, and religion of their authors. Special attention is given to William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Marin Držić (1508-1567) as the exemplars of English and Croatian Renaissance literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]