Jan Prus (1859–1926)

Excerpt

Jan Prus (Fig. 1) was born on January 26, 1859, in the town of Wadowice [1, 2] which at that time was within the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Frauenstadt, Kingdom of Galicia). In 1877, after finishing middle school in his hometown, Jan Prus started his medical studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. As a student, he worked as a demonstrator in the Department of General and Experimental Pathology under the guidance of the famous anatomist and pathologist Tadeusz Browicz [1]. After receiving his medical degree (in 1883), Prus became an assistant in the same department, and from 1885, he worked at the Clinic of Internal Medicine. In 1887, Jan Prus, thanks to a university scholarship, went to Paris, where he worked under the supervision of two world-famous scientists: pathologist A.V. Cornil and neurologist J.M. Charcot [1, 2]. After returning to partitioned Poland, he lived in Lviv (currently in Ukraine). In the years 1887–1889, Prus studied veterinary medicine. Simultaneously, he worked as an assistant at the Department of General Pathology of Veterinary Academy and, after graduation (in 1889), he was appointed assistant professor and head of this department [1]. Around the same time, Jan Prus married. He had two sons and a daughter. One of his sons—Marian (1889–1923)—was also a surgeon and an officer in the Polish army [3]. In 1896, Jan Prus became the Chair of the Department of Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University in Lviv, where he worked until retirement in 1917 [4]. In retirement, Prus held a private medical neurological practice. Jan Prus died suddenly of a heart attack while hunting near the town of Dobromil not far from Lviv on November 9, 1926, and he was buried in Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv on November 11, 1926 [5].

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