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would succumb to various diseases. Kosta Todorović PhD, referring to Valjevo, wrote the following
words that could apply to all the hospitals in Serbia: “While at the beginning of the epidemic all medical
personnel were devoted to their work and served trying to alleviate the misery of their patients, typhus
mercilessly mowed down all of them. There was not day passed that a doctor did not get sick and die.
Paramedics and the Sisters of Charity were falling down like sheaves of grain [...]
Fear from these hospitals was such that patients moaned and begged not to go there where one only
goes to die. Patients who had any force left in them would leave these “hospitals“ and drag themselves
through the town, looking for a shelter, not to see the indescribable misery that made a man's blood
froze in his veins.“
In the lack of hospital staff, the sick were often left to themselves; in the streets, in houses, barns, in
all possible places around the town, they lay dying among the corpses of those who died before them.
Those who survived typhus were affected also by gangrene. Reed described the sad reality of the
Valjevo hospital as follows: “There was also a terror room, full of people with typhoid gangrene, a
terrible disease [...] which makes the flesh rot and the bones crumble. The only hope to stop it is to
amputate the diseased part. And this room was full of people whose faces and chests were rotting away.
They were screaming and yelling, crying: “Woe mother! Mother of God, save me“. Their flesh would
fall off of them until gangrene would spread to their heart or brain, and then death would come in a
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horrible agony.“ The whole of January and February 1915 the Serbian people with their doctors spent
in that great drama. The doctors' reports to the National Committee for the Prevention of Infectious
Diseases in which they present their observations on the development of the diseases, especially
typhus, and methods for its suppression, are moving. The Serbian doctors did not give up, they sought
solutions. Already at the end of January, doctor Milan Jovanović Batut published a paper in which lice
are marked as the main carrier of typhus, and on 12 February a war against lice was officially declared.
The ingenious doctor Subotić suggested that lice could be killed by hot air, but with imperfect
apparatus, all the attempts were unsuccessful and would end up by burning clothes. To destroy lice, it
was necessary to increase the temperature to approximately 120 degrees Celsius.
The drama in the hospitals in the town and the surrounding areas of Valjevo continued. Veljko
Petrović, a writer, left a touching testimony about the Valjevo citizens who closed themselves in their
homes: “All the windows curtained, the gates locked, because on the sidewalk, in the street, the sick
soldiers are milling, stumbling, falling down and lying on the ground; some would walk in, red cheeked
and crazy eyed, in shirtsleeves, or bare naked, their arms stretched out, they would go - go somewhere, I
guess asking for water to escape from the fire raging inside them and burning their miserable bodies
away. Some more courageous soldiers would hold the sick by the hand and take them to a hospital, but
who would be there to receive them, who would keep them there, who would treat them? Occasionally a
sombre citizen would hastily scurry along the walls, avoiding, scared, disgusted to touch people,
jumping for his gate to immediately double lock it.“
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In all the auxiliary and permanent hospitals in Valjevo, the situation was very difficult, and it was the
most difficult in February. Almost all the medical staff, both local and foreign, were sick or dead. There
was no one left to treat the wounded and sick or to provide them the most basic aid, wound dressing,
feeding and change of clothes; they lay on the ground, everywhere, in uniforms that have not changed
for months. “The patients wandered through the rooms and corridors, bumping into each other, falling
down and rolling on the ground. The broke through the windows and jumped out into the yard, in the
snow“ said doctor Andra Đurović. In another auxiliary hospital, today the Medical School, they were
piling up bodies of dead soldiers for days, leaving them unburied. Probably the most difficult situation
was in the Fifth Infantry Regiment barracks. Since the beginning of the epidemic, or more precisely,
from the Austro-Hungarian occupation, it was converted into a hospital for infectious diseases. Several
patients shared one bed or in most cases they would lie on the floor. The renowned scientist Hirsfeld,
who worked in the hospital, later wrote about the patients: “Sometimes, in a delirium, some of them
would jump and run away to the town in his shirt, spreading fear and epidemic. From our hospital
several patients escaped and drowned in the nearby small river. They could not get to bury all the dead.
In the vicinity of the hospital, the corpses were deposited in a pile. There were cases that those who were
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unconscious were mistakenly put in the pile of corpses.“ It was said that few people left the hospital
alive. The situation on the Surgical Ward of the Country Hospital was much better because the sanitary
measures and a thorough cleaning and washing yielded good results. That was achieved also thanks to
the medical authorities who first transferred the excess numbers of the sick and wounded from this
hospital to the interior. Doctor Tienhoven and his team did not escape from the disease either, and all of
them caught it except one nurse. Immediately after the convalescence, doctor Tienhoven and his team
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left Valjevo in February 1915, to recover. At the beginning of the epidemic, the first auxiliary hospital
in the Seventeenth Regiment barracks at Jadar invested huge efforts with a large number of voluntary
paramedics and nurses. It received mostly Serbian soldiers whose treatment could not be carried out in
field hospitals. In addition to taking care of the wounded and sick, their treatment and feeding, the
nurses were responsible for the overall hygiene in the barracks. They washed the dressings and scanty
garments of the patients and staff themselves. The Head of that hospital was doctor Dušan Pomorišac,
and one of the most famous nurses in that hospital was our famous painter Nadežda Petrović.
The first doctor for whom it is now known that he died of typhoid in Valjevo in early 1915 was doctor
Jovan Stričević, the Head of the other auxiliary hospital in the Medical School building, who
surrendered to the Serbs in the course of the Battle of Cer. Pavle Vojteh, the Head of the Drina Military
Hospital had been infected while visiting the Seventeenth Regiment sick soldiers in Koceljeva, and
died in February 1915. Draginja Babić, born and raised in Valjevo as the first Serbian woman who had
graduated medicine in Berlin, died on the following day after doctor Vojteh's death on 6 February 1915.
One of the greatest losses suffered by the town of Valjevo was the death of doctor Selimir Đorđević.
Almost until his convalescence, he cared for doctor Tienhoven, the wounded and sick soldiers,
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