Heritage
Between the mountains and the sea, a small country kept changing how the world heals and thinks. Walk the line it drew.
Croatia is beautiful naturally — but it also contributed substantially to world science and medicine.
Let’s take a walk — we’ll show you why.
A small country on the Adriatic gave the world one of the founding tools of public health, two Nobel chemists, a founder of the WHO, and an antibiotic still used everywhere. This is the tradition Med&X was built to carry forward.
Let’s follow the line through history.
From a city on the Adriatic in 1377, the golden line begins — and it will not stop until today.
The Great Council of Ragusa ordered arrivals from plague areas into isolation, the trentino, before entering the city.
A mathematician and physicist who studied under Viète, he pioneered the algebraic treatment of geometry and experimented with parabolic mirrors and light.
His 1758 treatise Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis set out an early theory of force-points that anticipated ideas in modern physics.
Ragusa — the republic that first wrote quarantine into law, 1377.
A nation finding its shape — and its scientists changing the world.
His alternating-current system and the induction motor became foundations of how the world generates and uses electricity.
A forerunner of the taximeter and the tachograph, it read a vehicle’s speed electrically for the first time.
His method spread across the world under the name dactyloscopy, and still sits in every passport and phone today.
Generation, transmission and public lighting, together, the same year Niagara went into service. An IEEE Milestone in engineering history.
Zagreb — where a nation’s medicine gathered.
It went on to found every other medical school in Croatia and several in neighbouring countries.
Working in Zagreb and then Paris, he gave the field the idea of pathocenosis — the whole set of diseases present in a society at a given time.
His synthesis of androsterone and testosterone became foundational to modern hormone medicine.
At Cold Spring Harbor he brought together the future Nobel laureates Barbara McClintock and Alfred Hershey.
A pioneer of social medicine, he founded the School of Public Health in Zagreb in 1927. The first Assembly met at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.
Between the mountains and the sea — a small country kept changing science and medicine.
Nobel chemistry — and an antibiotic for the whole world.
He taught at the University of Zagreb and worked with the firm that would become PLIVA before joining ETH Zurich.
It was discovered by a PLIVA team led by Dr. Slobodan Đokić, with Gabrijela Kobrehel, Gorjana Radobolja-Lazarevski and Zrinka Tamburašev.
Four doses across three visits instead of five, developed by Ivo Vodopija and colleagues, it protects people against rabies across the world.
A small country that helped shape the world’s science and medicine.
In the end, it is about the people.
Every date on this walk is a person who chose to build — and the ones still building today.
The nation and its medicine, still growing together.
Trained in Croatia, at work across the world — Croatians shape science and medicine at some of the world’s great institutions today.
Trained in medicine at the University of Zagreb, a cardiac surgeon who now directs one of the world’s largest academic health systems.
Zagreb-born and Zagreb-educated, he helped reveal the atomic structure of the ribosome — the cell’s protein factory.
Zagreb-trained, he holds the Chair of International Health and Molecular Medicine and founded the Journal of Global Health.
Zagreb-born and Zagreb-trained, a world leader in ubiquitin cell biology — the signalling behind cancer and neurodegeneration.
Zagreb-born and Zagreb-trained, a professor at the University of Toronto who developed widely used methods for mapping how membrane proteins interact.
A leading Croatian neuroscientist and a founder of the Croatian Institute for Brain Research, known for his research on how the human brain develops.
Today Croatia is not only advancing science and medicine, but reaching outward — more ambitious than ever in connecting with the world’s leading institutions to learn, collaborate, and contribute at a far greater scale. Med&X builds those connections, in several ways.
The flagship gathering — where Nobel laureates and the world’s leading minds come to Croatia, and a new generation meets them face to face.
Uniting Croatian physicians and scientists from across the world — the diaspora and those at home — to collaborate as one community.
Sending Croatia’s most talented young generation to learn everything they can at the world’s best institutions — then bring it home.
Working through embassies and diplomacy to connect leading international physician-scientists with their Croatian counterparts.
The gala evening of the Plexus Conference — gathering the world’s medical and scientific leaders to see Croatian science and medicine in person, more than 150 guests each year.
To connect world-leading medicine and Croatian medicine, and to collaborate on shaping the future of medicine.
Scan to register at medx.hr
The line goes on.
Croatia in the story of science and medicine
Keep scrolling — the line continues.
