Jelena JOVANOVIĆ SIMIĆ
Muzej nauke i tehnike, Beograd
Dragomir BONDŽIĆ
Institut za savremenu istorijiu, Beograd
Stevan Ivanić (1884–1948) – A contribution to a biography
Abstract: Stevan Ivanić was a Serbian physician and head of the Health Services in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. A Socialist in his youth, in 1934 he joined the Zbor movement and promoted right-wing ideological views. He was commissar of social affairs and public health in 1941, and after the war he went into exile, where he died in 1948. The Communist authorities proclaimed him a criminal and traitor. So far, Ivanić’s biography has been available only in short encyclopedia entries. This paper is an attempt to supplement it with data from available archival material, periodicals and published literature and to present a fuller view of his professional and ideological-political activities and positions.
Key words: Stevan Ivanić, history of medicine, Zbor, Second World War, racism, Council of Commissars, collaboration, emigration
Summary: Based on archival material, periodicals and published literature, the paper presents a brief overview of Ivanić’s life and his professional medical and ideological-political attitudes and activities. Stevan Ivanić obtained the title of doctor of medicine in Vienna in 1910. He fought in the Balkan Wars and the First World War. In his medical career he went from district physician to the Head of the Department of Health Services of the Ministry of Social Politics and Public Health. He was especially involved in hygiene, bacteriology, social medicine, health education and healthcare cooperatives. He was the founder and first director of the Central Hygiene Institute, a member of the General Medical Council, and as the head of the department in the Ministry of the Health (1936–1941) he essentially ran the health service in the country. From 1933 he was an unsalaried lecturer at the Faculty of the Medicine in Belgrade, teaching Hygiene. Until 1928 he was a socialist, and in the early 1930s, together with Dimitrije Ljotić, he organized the Yugoslav National Movement Zbor and advocated right-wing, anti-communist and racist ideological views. At the beginning of the German occupation in 1941, he was commissar of social affairs and public health in the Milan Aćimović’s Council of Commissars, and later a member of the State Council in occupied Serbia. He left Serbia in October 1944 and lived in exile in Italy and Germany. In the spring of 1945, by decision of the Court of Honor, he was expelled from the University of Belgrade, and by decision of the State Commission for Determining the Crimes of the Occupiers and Their Abettors, declared a traitor. He was one of the nine doctors who were “publicly stigmatized” by the Plenum of the Serbian Medical Society in 1946 and “declared unworthy because of the crimes they committed against the people”.