Dr. Amalija Simec - Set

Amalija Šimec was born on October 30, 1893 in Tržič in the Gorenjska region. She studied medicine in Vienna, but then completed it in 1920 in Prague, where she went after being banned from studying for non-German students in Vienna. During the First World War, she worked as a doctor in war hospitals, and during the Carinthian plebiscite she organized an emergency hospital in Škofiči on Lake Wörthersee. Between 1921 and 1922, she specialized in bacteriology and epidemiology in Vienna and was the first Knafl scholarship holder to take a course in hematology in Zagreb and Vienna. She investigated the paratyphoid bacillus (bacillus paratyphi Hirschfeld) and the virulence of the Koch bacillus. During the years 1922–5, she ran the first bacteriological and epidemiological institution in Ljubljana and was the main organizer of a large awareness campaign against typhus. She then obtained a Rockefeller Fellowship and went on fulfillment to the U.S. and Canada to study the organization of the operation of public institutions. After returning to her homeland, she was the principal of the school for protective nurses in Zagreb. In the 1930s, she was a school doctor at the Hygiene Institute in Ljubljana and, since 1935, the head of the social-medical department at the Hygiene Institute. During this period, she also wrote the highly-sold handbook “Health Tips for Family and Home”. During the interwar period, she was very active in Catholic women’s organizations, which caused her difficulties in advancing after World War II. After World War II, she was the head of the department for the Supreme Sanitary Inspection at the Ministry of Health. In 1922, during her research work, she became infected with the germs of pure typhus culture, the infection caused her permanent damage to the heart muscle, and she died as a result on October 21, 1960.