"Society as an organism": metaphor as departure point of Andrija Stampar's health ideology.

most charismatic figures of the 20th century public health and a typical representative of social medical ideology at the turn of 20th century. He was the founder of many health-related institutions in Croatia and world-wide. In 1927, with the help of a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he opened the School of Public Health and the Institute of Hygiene in Zagreb. Andrija Štampar was among the leading figures in Croatian medicine. His endeavors and sociomedical ideas found fertile ground and left a mark not only in the national, but also in international setting. As a young man, he started publishing programmatic and popular science articles, promulgating his beliefs about social medicine and health enlightenment. Using the preserved corpus of Štampar’s published work, I analyzed the use of metaphor “society as an organism” as a basic instrument of expression of Štampar’s health ideology. Štampar’s language and metaphorics are clearly timeand context-dependent. On the one hand, they reflect a specific manner of expression characteristic of sociomedical framework and health enlightenment, widespread in the world at the turn of the 20th century. On the other, they are heavily influenced by national zeitgeist at the time, particularly the works of the writers such as A. M. Relković, Josip and Ivan Kozarac, and T. G. Masaryk. Organicistic approach to society and social diseases at the turn of the 20th century shaped both the unquestionable faith in the importance of disease prevention and the physicians’ approach. Thereby, the metaphor “society as an organism” became a specific cultural ethos of health protection movement, with Štampar as the leading representative at the national and international level. Andrija Štampar (1888-1958) (Figure 1) was born in Drenovac, a small village in Slavonia, Croatia, as the son of a village teacher. He completed his elementary education in his place of birth and finished high school in Vinkovci in 1906 (1). After that, he left Slavonia to study medicine in Vienna, where he also earned his doctoral degree in 1911. Štampar began his medical career as a general practitioner in Nova Gradiška. In 1919, he joined the Min“Society as an Organism:” Metaphor as Departure Point of Andrija Štampar’s Health Ideology