Abstract

In reminiscences on my father, doctor Jan Makarewicz, I focus on the period of his studies at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno, the brief period when he practiced medicine before the onset of the WWII, as a District Physician in Postawy and eventually as a deputy director and chief of the City Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Wilno. Upon repatriation to Gdansk, in 1945, he joined the faculty of the Medical School and begun to work at the Department of Hygiene, and later from 1950 at the Clinic of Infectious Diseases, Medical Academy of Gdańsk. From 1952 he was employed as the epidemiologist and a deputy director of Gdansk-District Public Epidemiology Authority. Father was actively involved in facing the challenge to the public health system brought by the epidemic of the smallpox in 1953. He was then in charge of the quarantine hospital in Gdansk. He died in Gdańsk in 1963.