Hospital provision in interwar Central Europe: a review of the field

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article provides a comparative assessment of the provision of hospital services in interwar Central Europe. It presents the findings of a project to review the primary and secondary sources available for the study of healthcare in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary 1918–38 and to provide initial conclusions about how these new states embarked on the task of constructing an institutional infrastructure. The historiographical and archival review demonstrates some of the problems inherent in comparative history, especially the diverse, and often patchy, range of sources available. Building on this it explores three themes: provision and growth of the hospitals of each nation; the impact of geography, especially urban and rural and western and eastern divides, on that infrastructure; and the modes and problems of funding institutional care. It considers the problems each nation faced in constructing a new national healthcare system out of two or even three existing modes of delivery and the barriers faced by largely rural nations when attempting to construct and fund a modern institutional infrastructure.