Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Medicine in Poland


A cover from my friend in Poland 🇵🇱 with thematic stamps ! 

World Blood Donor Day 
Every year on 14 June, countries around the world celebrate World Blood Donor Day(WBDD). The event, established in 2004, serves to raise awareness of the need for safe blood and blood products, and to thank blood donors for their voluntary, life-saving gifts of blood. It is celebrated every year on the day of birthday anniversary of Karl Landsteiner on 14 June 1868 - (a great scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his great discovery of the ABO blood group system)

Date of issue - 14 June 2015 
Designer - Andrzej Gosik 

World Blood Donor Day is one of eight official global public health campaigns marked by the WHO along with World Health Day, World Tuberculosis Day, World Immunization Week, World Malaria Day, World No Tobacco Day, World Hepatitis Day, and World AIDS Day.

The themes for the World Blood Donor Day for the recent years have been 

2018 - Be there for someone else. Give blood. Share life 
2017 - Give blood. Give now. Give often 
2016 - Blood connects us all. 
2015 - Thank you for saving my life 
2014 -  Safe blood for saving mothers 
2013 - Give the gift of blood : donate blood 
2012 -  Every blood donor is a hero 

I am a strong supporter for voluntary blood donation and I love this stamp. I hope many young and fit people donate blood atleast once a year. You will be saving a life and someone will be thanking you :) 




Polish Medical Association- 200 years 
Year of issue - 2005 

The pedigree of Polish medical associations is very remote and with over 200 years of tradition. The Polish lands in the nineteenth century were under the annexation of three great powers: Austria, Prussia and Russia. National awareness of Poles grew and Polish doctors felt the need to associate.
This resulted in the fact that in 1805 a Medical Society was established in Vilnius on the initiative of Jędrzej Śniadecki, one of the greatest scholars of the Polish Enlightenment, and the current Patron of the Polish Medical Society. It was one of the first medical organizations in this part of Europe. Other medical societies were established in all partitions. In 1820, the Medical Society of Warsaw was founded. 

After regaining Poland's independence in 1918, a period of spontaneous formation of local medical societies took place. Unfortunately, the Second World War interrupted fruitful activity of Polish medical societies, but many doctors raised in the interwar period recorded with their heroic activity the most beautiful cards of the latest Polish history.



Organ transplantation
 ISSUE DATE: 20 March 2015
 STAMP DESIGN: Maciej Jędrysik

 Organ transplantation is the moving of an organ from one body to another or from a donor site to another location on the person's own body, to replace the recipient's damaged or absent organ. The emerging field of regenerative medicine is allowing scientists and engineers to create organs to be re-grown from the person's own cells (stem cells, or cells extracted from the failing organs). 
Several organs like Heart, Liver , Kidney, Pancreas, Cornea have been transplanted. 

Thanks Wojtek for this cover - and hope you recovered soon from your flu ! Thanks for a nice thematic cover :) 

And - my search for the most famous doctors / physicians of Poland led me to many famous ones like Marie Curie , etc . But I was very impressed with the story of two doctors - heroes of World War II  - who saved more Poles than even Schindler, with their intelligence and medical knowledge. 

Dr. Stasiek Matulewicz and Dr. Eugene Lazowski 

Lazowski and Matulewicz were two doctors in a town - Rozwadow , who came up with an ingenious plan to protect several Poles from extortion to concenteration camps and torture by Germans. Germans were morbidly scared of Typhus fever - a disease common in war times and transmitted by lice. The two doctors injected a serum ( Proteus ) into people with simple fever and running nose , while treating their common ailments . Their blood was later sent to the German labs run by Nazis to test for Typhus , and they tested positive ( fake typhus ) .. And these two physicians created a false epidemic of Typhus in many villages in the occupied Poland , thus preventing the Germans from entering these areas .. They believed that they had to save Poles to rebuild the war torn country when the war was over. 
The two doctors escaped death many times and came close to suspicions by the Nazis. They survived the war and Dr. Lazowski lived on till 2001 and retired as a professor in USA. 







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