Agents of public health and hygiene in Czechoslovakia had a distinct inducement to appropriate this new Marxist-Leninist approach. The dictates of Pavlovian dialectical-medicine placed the potential for human change, both positive and negative, in the external world. Human health was contingent on the development of a salubrious living and working environment: everything from urban planning to objects of furniture, from clothing to mining machinery, necessitated expert and scientific input on the physiologic and hygienic ideal. The role of public health and hygiene was therefore to act as caretaker and manager of this health-producing relationship between man and the environment, a perspective which offered an exponential increase in medical authority.
This paper looks at the efforts of Czechoslovak hygienists to construct an ideal and healthy socialist community through mobilizing the discursive power and ideological authority of dialectical-medicine. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, attempts to curb pollution, impact industrial design, guide urban planning, and effect change in the economic priorities of the communist system were ubiquitous among both researchers and practitioners. But, as this paper shows, the consistent pressure to develop a hygienic community based on a Marxist-Leninist approach to health failed to alter the Communist Party’s fixation on industrial growth. Although these hygienists succeeded in forcing the regime to acknowledge and negotiate with a competing vision for the development of socialist society, the perceived needs of industry and local economy invariably preempted the demands of dialectical-medicine.