Fran Gundrum was a Croatian physician, encyclopedist, and an advocate of medical enlightenment and healthy lifestyle. Although he rejected the notions of born prostitutes and born criminals, defended by Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, he still regarded eugenics as a convenient method of dealing with the ills of society. He believed that criminals were degenerate individuals representing a violent threat to the society and that it was legitimate to use radical means, such as sterilization and deportation, to deal with this problem.
Organicistic view of the society prevented him from seeing the individual rights as important as that of the society to protect itself. While working as a physician in Bulgaria, where the awareness of the importance of disease prevention was quite low, he developed interest in public health activities and hygiene. As a polyglot he was able to participate in international conferences, where he got acquainted with new ideas and medical advances of the time.
He published numerous booklets, manuals, and health guides, focusing primarily on alcoholism, tuberculosis, and dental care, and he was especially concerned about poor psychophysical health of young population 2 - 9. It should be noted that Gundrum, while working for the Medical Association of Croatia and Slavonia, suggested the development of Code of Ethics for Physicians This idea of his eventually came to fruition in , and again in , when Croatian Medical Association issued the ethical code.
So far, only one comprehensive biographic-bibliographic book about Gundrum has been published 1 , as well as several reprints of his works. However, no thorough analysis of his role, influence, and activities has been carried out that would help us determine his place in the history of health enlightenment, eugenics, and other trends at the time in this part of Europe. In that period, Gundrum was at the height of his professional, intellectual, and writing career.
Many theoreticians of the time argued in favor of Darwinism and saw it as the best paradigm for organization of the society, complementing the Darwinian ideas of natural selection with their moral theories. Thus, the evolutionary ethics was born. Its followers no longer thought that ethical categories of good and evil should be defined according to the Biblical dogmas, but rather to laws of nature The thesis that human beings inherit their moral characteristics just like they inherit their biological instincts offered a different point of view for dealing with ethical issues.
