Dr. Bojan Pirc (1901–1991), an internationally recognized medical statistician: On the 110th Anniversary of His Birth

Abstract

Background: Using Andrija Štampar’s ideology, modern Slovenian public healthcare following the First World War gradually transformed private healthcare into public healthcare available to everyone. Public healthcare professionals specializing in social medicine, hygiene, healthcare organization, and medical statistics were trained in Europe and in the USA under the auspices of the United Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation. This paper discusses the first Slovenian (Yugoslav) and international expert in medical and vital statistics, Bojan Pirc. Methods: A retrospective historical-medical approach was used to examine the primary and secondary sources on Bojan Pirc’s life and work. The results were also obtained by analyzing Pirc’s extensive bibliography of research and technical articles. Results: In the academic year 1927/28, the physician Bojan Pirc (1901–1991) studied at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Public School of Health in Baltimore on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. There he took graduate-level courses in statistics, epidemiology, public healthcare organization, and hygiene. He became the leading Yugoslav expert in medical and vital statistics. From 1928 onwards, he worked at the Central Hygienic Institute in Belgrade, serving as head of the social medicine department for most of his time there. From 1948 to 1955 Pirc was Director of the Yugoslav Medical Sstatistics Office, and from 1955 to 1961 he served as a World Health Organization expert, for which his duties included heading the Epidemiology Research Department in Geneva. From 1955 to 1971, he held the position of professor at the Zagreb Medical Faculty, and from 1967 to 1974 he served as a part-time statistics instructor at the Ljubljana Medical Faculty, then till 1980 as its professor. From 1968 to 1980 he headed the graduate program in public healthcare in Ljubljana and Maribor as part of the Andrija Štampar School of Public Health in Zagreb. He helped organize the Yugoslav hygiene service and analyzed the dynamics of infectious diseases in Yugoslavia (1919–1928). He and his brother Ivo Pirc coauthored several textbooks on hygiene and prepared a basic study titled Zdravje v Sloveniji I – Življenjska bilanca Slovenije v letih 1921– 1935 (Health in Slovenia I: Births and Deaths in Slovenia, 1921–1935). In addition, he developed a medical statistics system methodology for all of Yugoslavia, which was also well received internationally. Thanks to him, medical statistics became an independent research area.