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The story below is about a very important Czech doctor, Premysl Pelnar, who recently passed away (5th of April, 2009) at the age of 95 years old. Dr. Pelnar, a Czech physician, who immigrated to Canada from the former Czechoslovakia in 1964, played a significant role in the area of occupational health. For example, he organized several research projects that resulted in hundreds of scientific publications and lead several research projects all over the world. A fund named “Dr. Premysl (Mike) Pelnar Academic Enrichment Fund” was also established in his honor in the Department of Occupational Health at McGill University in Montreal. The story is written by our new author Josef Cermak, a Doctor of Law, journalist, writer, poet, actor and a lifelong organizer of public and scientific life for Czech and Slovak countrymen in Canada. The Czech version to this article can be found in our “Czech Only” version of CzechFolks.com named CzechFolks.com PLUS, where he regularly contributes with his insightful and brilliant articles.

I am hoping that Dr. Premysl (Premík, Mike) Pelnar is with us in spirit. I am sure that if he could, he would be with us in body as well. And most likely would deliver a riveting, charming and smiling oration on the vicissitudes of his life. And what a life it was!

Premik (Mike) was born in Prague, in January 1914, the year which also witnessed the outbreak of World War 1. His father was an eminent professor of medicine at Prague’s Charles University, though I seem to remember him more as a brilliant practitioner of surgery than an academic. Premik followed in his father’s footsteps, graduating from his alma mater in 1937 and securing a position as an assistant at the university’s department of internal medicine.
Two years later Hitler’s armies occupied Czechoslovakia, nine student leaders were executed, Czech universities were closed, Premik’s brother was arrested and Premik himself interrogated by Gestapo.

Premik - as quite a few others - found refuge in a hospital in Zlin, the headquarters of Bata shoe organization. The hospital was built by the organization’s founder Thomas Bata and Premik found employment in the hospital’s Institute of Industrial Hygiene, examining Bata employees whose health was at risk because of exposure to chemicals or excessive noise.

After the end of World War II, Premik was sent by the Ministry of Education to study occupational medicine in the United States. While visiting American hospitals and attending seminars, he met some of the leading experts in occupational medicine, including Dr. George Wright, who was to play a major role in his life. On his return home, Premik submitted to the Czechoslovak government a plan for the development of occupational standards in the then just nationalized chemical industry which led to his appointment as chief medical officer of that industry. Twelve years later he was let go as politically unreliable. It took him six months to find a new job: that of physician at the institute of Uranium mining in northern Bohemia which was run by Soviet consultants who were more interested in continued production than the health of the employees, many of them political prisoners.

This period of his life is poignantly described by Czech writer Sonja Sinclair in a piece written at the occasion of Premik’s (she calls him Mike) eightieth birthday. She wrote: “By then married with two children, Mike commuted to his new work place from Prague, catching an unheated bus at 5 a.m. on Monday mornings and back on Satuday afternoons… During the week, Mike was billeted in a wooden structure in a room which he shared with another doctor. The room contained two beds, a small table and one chair - there was no room for another. Across the hall, a washroom used by all the inhabitants of that floor was equipped with a long iron pipe with water spouts spaced at a regular distance.”

Eventually he was allowed to start a clinic for occupational diseases and the miners showed their appreciation by bestowing on him the rank of “honorary miner” - a title which probably meant more to him than many of the titles he had obtained during his life. After three years of this work Premik was appointed to the scientific staff at the occupational disease department of Charles University treating patients who suffered from silicosis, chronic bronchitis and various forms of industrial poisoning. His special task was the development of a laboratory for bronchoscopy. He also continued to serve as a member of the editorial board of an occupational medicine magazine which he edited from 1949 until he was asked to step down because he had no political qualifications (meaning membership in the Communist party).

Then, in 1964, Premik made a decision he never regretted, even though it meant leaving a country whose history and culture was ingrained in the very core of his being: to leave Czechoslovakia. Of course, leaving a Communist country was never easy - you had to leave your family behind as hostages. Premik solved this problem brilliantly: a Finnish doctor friend invited him to a scientific seminar in Helsinki and Premik applied for an exit visa for himself alone. His application was approved by the Ministry of Education. At the same time Premik’s wife and their children applied to the police for permission to visit the Finnish doctor’s wife. It worked.

McGill University

Once in Finland, the Pelnar family applied for asylum in the United States. Their application (Premik’s reputation no doubt helped) was quickly approved. Not to endanger their Finnish friends, the family travelled to Stockholm where a visa was issued to what was then West Germany. In Frankfurt, they were quickly processed and within days they were on their way to Cleveland, with not much more than the clothes on their backs - and Ivana’s guitar. Cleveland welcomed them: Premik almost immediately started to work as research assistant at the St. Luke Hospital as well as clinical instructor at the medical school of Western Reserve University, a job arranged for him by his old friend, Dr. George Wright. About two years later, again on Dr. Wright’s recommendation, Premik was appointed operational head of the new Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health (later renamed Asbestos Institute) in Montreal, a research institute for the study of diseases traceable to asbestos. During the following years Premik took the academic world by storm, organizing some 45 research projects at universities and institutes in Canada, the U.S., Britain, Italy and Finland. This research resulted in hundreds of scientific publications all over the world and made a substantial contribution to the knowledge of the effects of asbestos and other fibers.

Among the acknowledgements Premik received was appointment as adjunct professor at the department of epidemiology and health at McGill University and later at the university’s School of Occupational Medicine which is supported by the faculties of medicine, engineering and research (where he for example undertook a major study of the effects of vibration on lumberjacks working with chain saws). He became a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians as well as a Fellow Emeritus of the Canadian Board of Occupational Medicine. In 1991 he was honored by his alma mater, Charles University in Prague and in 1994, the Dr. Premysl (Mike) Pelnar Academic Enrichment Fund was established in the Department of Occupational Health at McGill University in Montreal.

Meeting Premik the first time - and without knowing his career - you’d have a difficult time guessing how he made his living and who he really was. On one hand you felt that he had enough charm to sell a lottery ticket as if it were guaranteed investment certificate, and on the other, that this was a man for whom honor meant as much as it did to General Douglas McCarther, to whom honor was the centerpiece of his existence. Premik was always unfailingly courteous with ladies, gallant so much so that you felt that in ages past he would made a perfect courtier, even at the court of Louis XIV. He could have been a dance master or a real estate salesman or perhaps prime minister. I never heard him speak of his accomplishments, but I always heard him laugh, with a joyful and hearty laugh of a man with a boy’s innocent heart. And I saw - at a few precious moments - the love and tenderness he felt for the love of his life, Hana.

Josef Čermák

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Tento příběh je o velmi významném českém lékaři, Přemyslu Pelnáři, který nedávno zemřel (5. dubna 2009) ve věku 95 let. Dr. Pelnář, který imigroval do Kanady z bývalého Československa v roce 1964, hrál významnou roli v oblasti ochrany zdraví. Například zorganizoval několik výzkumných projektů, z kterých vznikly stovky vědeckých publikací a vedly k několika výzkumným projektům po celém světě. Fond s názvem ” Dr. Premysl (Mike) Pelnar Academic Enrichment Fund” byla také založen na jeho počest v oddělení ochrany zdraví při McGill Univerzitě v Montrealu. Příběh napsal náš nový autor Josef Čermák, doktor práv, novinář, spisovatel, básník, herec a celoživotní organizátor veřejného a vědeckého života českých a slovenských krajanů v Kanadě. Českou verzi tohoto článku tentokrát najdete v naší “pouze české” verzi CzechFolks.com nazvaným CzechFolks.com PLUS, kde pravidelně přispívá svými bystrými a skvělými články. 

ODKAZ ZDE

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