Professor MUDr., DrSc. Josef Koutecký

“Of course I remember the Prague Uprising, because I built the barricades and carried the wounded. I was fifteen, was a strong young boy. But I also have unpleasant memories of the uprising when the rebels caught a young German soldier, not a Gestapo officer, a Wehrmacht soldier, all young Germans had to serve in the military, including the Hitlerjugend when Hitler was in problems. Just imagine the scene, they caught him, hung him upside down on a street lamp, the Prague street lamp – today we have the tall ones, then they were not that tall. They sprinkled him with gasoline and set him on fire. I remember groups of Germans being led from their flats. Unfortunately, negative human properties were given go, when Czechs, standing by the road and watched the processions of Germans, kicked them, beat them or spat on them. I think this was unnecessary. I know that the people were angry by the six years of war and crimes committed by the Nazi regime, but still I think one should not respond in this way. One should be just and dignified.”

“Then they approached me twice in the hospital. First time it was just one officer, he wanted some data from me and promised that I would be able to travel to Japan and elsewhere. I threw him out as well. The third time, it was quite exceptional: just imagine it. They came up to me, asking me to take in a mother with her child into our ward. I was supposed to tell her that there was a suspicion of her child having a tumour. They didn’t hide the real reason: they wanted her out of her flat so they could make a proper search. I told them, ‘You are completely mad. You bring some lady, I have never seen her, never examined the child and I should tell her that there is a suspicion of a tumour? It’s absurd!’ And now listen: what I refused, a colleague at a different clinic consented to.”

“Already as a child surgeon at the clinic of child surgery I started to practise oncology at the orphanage. The zoo bought two gorilla youngsters from Cameroon for a lot of money, in dollars. Foreign currency was highly protected in the communist regime. And with one of the little gorilla they found out that she has got a protuberance on her butt, and they were afraid she might have a tumour. And what else, it was a gorilla, similar creature to a man, a younger on top, and suspected tumour – so who else than Koutecký should do the job. So they called me from the zoo, I examined the gorilla and agreed I would operate her at the clinic, out of operation hours, but with all the fuss, the primary of anaesthesiology gave her anaesthetics. But already prior to the operation I knew she had no tumour, it was just a shot.“

“From the department a Child Oncology Clinic was established, the only one of its kind in the Czechoslovakia. So we were treating children from all of the state with a terrible lack of everything – space, beds, medicine and equipment, under really terrible conditions. Those children only had a hallway, when they did not have to lie down. They were playing in the hall, they ate in the hall, all visits took place there too. They were lying in two sharing a single bed; some infants were in a pram as we had no little bed. Or we had only a mattress for them to sleep on the ground. And we said to the children, although it was all prohibited, whether they had any relatives abroad or friends, who would smuggle medicine for them, the cytostatic kind. With children it is an advantage that the dosage is calculated based on the body surface or according to weight and they are really small. So using the bottle we could not keep open for very long time, we could also treat the children without any relatives abroad. And when we asked for an extra import, it normally took two, three or four months and during that time the metastasis appeared with the child. So too often we sadly got a treatment only after the child was dead.”

“Love towards the field was really immense and I devoted it all my energy. But you know it was tough. A life amongst dying children and those unhappy parents was little fun for me. I could not just close the door and forget about what was happening in the hospital. So I had to deal with all that stuff including a total lack of supplies in all areas. But still our results were getting better. At the start everyone just raised their eyebrows thinking: ,He is just a fool. What is he really doing? All those children were meant to die anyway, his work is a waste of time!‘ So I gradually proved it was not all in vain, as the percentage of surviving children was growing gradually and currently the statistics say that out of a hundred only seventeen children die so that makes eighty-three survivors. Back then only three percent made it. That is an eighty percent difference. So I think that the efforts, strain, obstacles we had to overcome, it was all worth it and my work life was worth it too.“

“In certain situations we did not even have surgery gloves. When the glove got torn apart, there was no sterility anymore and you could not operate. But we kept the torn ones, cut little squares out of them and when there was a hole in another glove we used it to repair the damage, then sterilised it and operated in patched rubber gloves! No one would believe it today. When we plastered the fracture to the children, we did our own plaster bandages. A normal bandage, a bag of plaster, now it was dripping, plastering the plaster and packing it again.”