Adalbert Czerny Facts
Adalbert Czerny Facts
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| Interesting Adalbert Czerny Facts: |
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| Czerny was born in a town in Poland that was then under Austrian rule. |
| He spent most of his childhood in Viennna, before he afforded the opportunity to attend university in Prague. |
| His original studies and his doctoral thesis focused on kidney diseases, but this laid the groundwork for him to specialize in uncovering systemic diseases. |
| The concept of pediatric medicine in a way that viewed children as vastly different patients than adults was not entirely unheard of in Czerny's day, but it was his groundbreaking work in nutrition, physiology, and disease prevention that gave him this acclaim. |
| He founded the International School of Pediatrics to help train doctors in the field. |
| At this school, instruction focused on nutrition and metabolism of pediatric patients, especially newborns, and was important to understanding the processes and health of the first years of life. |
| His work sought to address the high infant mortality rate that still affected society in that day. |
| Czerny's most highly regarded published work deals with the nutrition of newborns and nutrition as a therapeutic process in children, and is still known for its groundbreaking work today. |
| Among his many contributions to the field of children's medicine is his isolation of symptoms that were thought to be indicative of other diseases, proving that they were not related but were masking. |
| One such disease is now called Czerny diathesis, which is hallmarked by an increase in mucus production and skin sensitivity, but that doctors had originally assumed was symptomatic of tuberculosis. |
| He further went on to separate causes of symptoms as either stemming from infection, stemming from poor nutrition, or caused by individual predisposition (genetics), and to isolate specific courses of treatment for each. |
| Czerny was the first to theorize that a child's nutrition will have a direct result on his behavior, an idea unheard of until he proposed it. |
| Because of the importance nutrition plays in a patient's health, Czerny was responsible for a revolutionary concept in his day, namely that of "physician as educator" whose role was to instruct patients and their families instead of merely treating illnesses and diseases after they occurred. |
| This approach to preventive medicine, especially in a field dominated with superstition, tradition, and poor advice, quite possibly made one of the biggest impacts on lowering the infant mortality rate. |
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