Collection of photographs preserved in the Croatian Museum of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts motivated me to compile the text entitled Tuberculosis and the reverse of the city: photographs of Zagreb’s housing misery from the collection of Vladimir Ćepulić in cooauthorship with Silvija Brkić Midžić. Our work was published in our oldest croatian medical journal Liječnički vjesnik lounched in 1877. (https://hrcak.srce.hr/251414, https://lijecnicki-vjesnik.hlz.hr/ ). The research was based on 13 photographs, and was a starting point in analysis of social medicine/pathology with particular emphasis on tuberculosis in Croatia at the beginning of the 20th century. The early presence of this vague collection in the context of social photography advent in Croatia was emphasized as well as its museological value as the acquisition of the first Museum for the History of Health established in Zagreb by the Croatian Medical Association in 1944. Hence for our project blog I selected one of those photographs shot in the centre of Zagreb in 1924. by an anonymous photographer (Housing misery in Vlaška Street in Zagreb in 1924, inv. no. HMMF-4626). It presents the drama of poverty and bad housing as a potential focus of diseases. Recent earthquake and pandemic of COVID-19 displayed the reverse of our city, bad housing and bad houses… To look back is therefore not only disturbing but warning as well.
Stella Fatović-Ferenčić
Housing misery in Vlaška Street in Zagreb in 1924, Croatian Museum of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, inv. no. HMMF-4626
