"In most cases, these small children are being referred as fetuses. But I maintain that every woman carries a child, not just a fetus. And by that I mean, and I'm getting to... we made the mistake of not recommending burial when this happened [the child died]. Now it turns out that was a gross mistake, because those women need mourning."
"Three days before, I was in Switzerland on vacation, and they offered me a job and said, 'The Russians will come in,' and I said, 'They won't come in.' So we came back; the next day the Russians came. I found out at night when a friend called me and said, 'The Russians have come in!' It was hard. Of course, my opinion of the Russians changed."
"In Jindřichův Hradec I started to specialise in kidney diseases. I gained a lot of experience in that field. When I came to České Budějovice, what I learned in Hradec, what I learned in Prague in fact, because I used to go there, was not clearly accepted. To them, to the doctors in that region, I was just a country doctor who meddled in things. It was only after three years, or two years maybe, that they understood that this was in fact the modern pediatric nephrology. So we must not forget that. Then I started, I was the first, not the first, I started building the intensive care unit. The problem was I didn't have the money. The problem was I didn't have the literature. The problem was that they wouldn't take me seriously when I said I had babies under 1,500 grams in mind. And so on. And then gradually, at a great cost and my own personal cost as well, I built the foundation for that neonatal intensive care."
Miloš Velemínský was born on 14 August 1936 in České Budějovice. As an eight-year-old he experienced the liberation of Třeboň by the Red Army. His father was a member of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party and in 1948 he refused the merger of the party with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Because of his father‘s political views, the witness had problems with his admission to grammar school in the second half of the 1940s. In 1954, he entered the Medical Faculty in Prague and became a pediatrician in 1960. From the 1960s onwards, he specialized in the care of newborns. In 1969 he became the head of the neonatology department at the hospital in České Budějovice. Throughout the communist period he struggled with the lack of literature, the lack of modern equipment and the impossibility of going abroad for a scholarship. He obtained journals and other study resources necessary for the development of a first-rate, modern medical care only unofficially, from friends living in the West. On more than one occasion he was interrogated by the State Security Service (StB). In České Budějovice, he focused on the care of pathologically ill newborns. During the 1970s and 1980s, he managed to build an intensive care unit for newborns and low birth weight newborns, which was one of the best in Czechoslovakia and whose standards was close to those in the West. In 1984, he established the first independent neonatal ward in Czechoslovakia in the České Budějovice hospital. Miloš Velemínský was one of the main representatives of neonatology in the country. From 2001 to 2008 he served as Dean of the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences of the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. In 2022, he lived in Třeboň. Miloš Velemínský died on March 16, 2024.
