Dr Stanisław Michałek-Grodzki (1889?1951) – twórca polskiej szkoły chirurgii plastycznej

Abstract

Dr Stanisław Michałek-Grodzki was the first plastic surgeon in Poland. To obtain the appropriate qualifications he was trained in foreign clinics in France, Italy and Czechoslovakia. During the First World War he was a military doctor. From the early 1930s, he sought to create a clinic for people requiring reconstructive and plastic surgery, and to create a special plastic surgery department. During the German occupation of Poland, he worked at the Ujazdowski Hospital in Warsaw, where he performed hundreds of reconstruction operations to save injured Polish soldiers from disability. Despite the imminent danger, he performed procedures reversing the effects of circumcision on Jews hiding on the so-called Aryan side. In 1951 he became the director of the first hospital in Poland dealing in plastic and reconstructive surgery. He left behind unpublished medical documentation, including photos, radiographs and videos of his procedures, and a book of his own authorship.