Eighty, a number beautifully incorporated into our celebration logo, represents a time of celebration of the founding of our Faculty of Medicine. The year 1945 brought several watershed events, the main one being the liberation of our homeland from the German yoke. However, before our grandfathers and fathers lived to see the days of May, a new yoke began to be forged in Košice – the Košice Government Programme.
The Košice Government Programme is the programme document approved by the government on 5 April 1945 at a meeting in Košice after the arrival on Czechoslovak territory. The document determined the principles of future policy and was referred to as the “programme of national and democratic revolution”. It shifted Czechoslovakia’s orientation further towards the USSR and “legally” anchored its dependence on the USSR. It declared the collective guilt of the right-wing political parties and the German and Hungarian populations for the break-up of Czechoslovakia and their collaboration with the Nazi regime. The draft text was prepared by representatives of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
After gaining freedom, the National Assembly had not yet been established; the period of presidential decrees continued. The President has been using them since 1940, they were signed until February 1945 under the provisional state system in London, with two signed in Košice and the rest in Prague, in the liberated Czechoslovakia. By the Constitutional Act of the Provisional National Assembly of 1946, they were all declared law. (Wikipedia citation)
On 27 October 1945, President Beneš issued one of his last decrees (the sixth from the end), “Decree of the President of the Republic on the establishment of a branch of the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Pilsen”, and the modern history of medical education in Pilsen began.
The 80 years that our Faculty of Medicine is celebrating symbolize the length of a human life from birth to old age, eventually death. Not every human individual, let alone every organization, manages to live that long. Our faculty was born after the bleak war years in a brief period of happiness and determination, hope and faith in a better future, but it did not last three years. In difficult times, our faculty developed, going through its period of childhood and adolescence before becoming an independent faculty of Charles University. Here, in adulthood, it separates from the natural rhythm of human life, continues to grow stronger, develops, but does not age. It is kept young not only by new assistant professors, associate professors and professors, but especially by students, of whom our faculty hosts over two thousand today.
The main asset of the faculty, however, are the people who, since its beginning and for many decades, have been loyal to it. Every one of us who graduated at the Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen has in his memory a teacher who particularly appealed to them and with whom he has been comparing his performance throughout his life. No one could better express the relationship to the school than a colleague whose dad worked at the faculty for several decades. “I was spoiled by the Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen; my first childhood word was epithelium.”
This entire year will be punctuated with colorful events to mark the anniversary of our faculty, remembering important leaders of the faculty, and places where the faculty has been housed in makeshift premises everywhere. The celebrations will culminate on November 4, 2025 with a ceremonial assembly of the faculty’s staff and the academic community attended by numerous guests led by Her Magnificence, the Rector, Professor Králíčková. She will attend not only as a representative of Charles University, but also as one of the many members of our distinguished alumni.
Ladies and gentlemen, let us all try to ensure that in the years to come, our successors will remember the year of the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Faculty not only as a significant social event, but as a moment from which further qualitative development of our alma mater took place.
prof. Jindřich Fínek, M.D., Ph.D.
Dean of the Faculty
