Chirurgovy úspěchy a zklamání – Hájek Miloš (2011)

The book "The Surgeon’s Successes and Disappointments" spans a temporal arc from the early 1950s to the present day, thus presenting a document that truthfully, with perspective and irony, reflects on the pre-November destructive practices that affected all spheres of social life and human activity, including medicine and its protagonists. It features significant figures in Czech medicine, whom the author, Prof. MUDr. Miloš Hájek, CSc., encountered during his studies and later in his workplaces: among them are surgeon Arnold Jirásek, renowned internist Josef Charvát, orthopedist Jan Zahradníček, gynecologist Josef Jerie, as well as Emil Dienstbier, Jiří Niederle, Zdeněk Mysliveček, František Patočka, brother of philosopher Jan Patočka, pathologist Josef Hepner, his close associate, Vinohrady surgeon Emerich Polák, and many others. The author has been passionate about traveling since his youth: he embarks on journeys for pleasure and knowledge and guides his friends through foreign lands with the same enthusiasm with which he describes his life experiences. In the most absurd social situations and in his profession, often accompanied by thrilling adrenaline adventures, he has never ceased to perceive surgery as 'the science and art of the divine' and has not abandoned his vision of a surgeon, a desire to deepen...