I couldn’t live anywhere else, says centenarian doctor
Jan Iserle was born in Pardubice on 15 October 1919. His father taught at a real school, his mother was a housewife. Jan had one older sister, Hana. After grammar school, he enrolled to study medicine in Prague, but when the Nazis closed the universities in autumn 1939, he returned to Pardubice. To avoid forced labour, he was employed at the hospital’s insurance company. He helped doctors who were actively cooperating with the resistance, many of whom were arrested and executed after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. After the war he completed his studies of medicine and was employed at the ophthalmology department in Hradec Králové. He refused to join the army and become a military doctor, nor did he accept membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He conducted research on intra-ocular lenses with Professor Vanýsek, whom he followed to an eye clinic in Brno in 1955. After spending six years in the Moravian metropolis, he returned to East Bohemia to win an appointment as chief doctor of the opthalmology department in his native Pardubice. He retained this position for 23 years. As an enthusiastic sportsman, he helped establish the Pardubice ice-hockey scene and accompanied the city’s hockey team as a club doctor for many years. In 1996 he left the hospital to follow a private enterprise. As of 2021, aged 101, he lived in Pardubice in good health and humour.