Vladislav Kruta's Library

Bibliographic list [doc]
Bibliographic list [pdf]

Bravený-Franc: Vladislav Kruta (only in Czech)

Prof. Vladislav Kruta donated 1375 books and periodicals to Masaryk University in 1970s. In 2008 this collection was integrated into the Masaryk University Campus Library. Meet the personality of Vladislav Kruta and see the list of Vladislav Kruta' Library.

Vladislav Kruta's biography
by Pavel Bravený and Zdeněk Franc

Professor Vladislav Kruta M.D., Dsc. (1908 – 1979), was born in Bělá pod Bezdězem in Northern Bohemia. After completing his secondary school in Prague, he enrolled the Medical Faculty of Charles University. Already a year before graduation, he became a Junior Assistant at the Department of Physiology and remained faithful to this discipline forever. A series of stays in France since 1934, mostly in Professor Lapique´s laboratory in Paris, had an essential impetus on his professional career as well as on his personal life. He became acquainted with prominent European scientists, their style of work and also met his future wife Emmy Bahualt.
Kruta´s original orientation to neurophysiology soon deviated to cardiac functions – automaticity, rhythmicity and contractility. During the period 1935 – 1938, alternately spent in Prague and Paris, he published dozens of scientific papers. Those about the relationship of cardiac contractility to the rhythm and temperature became classic, quoted until these days. At his 30 years of age, Kruta married and was promoted private lecturer (associate professor) at the Charles University. He was able to render an account for a respectable research work, was well known internationally and could reckon with a glaring scientific career. However, the onset of World War II turned all the expectations upside down.
In summer 1939, Kruta together with his spouse emigrated to France and immediately registered in the emerging Czechoslovak Army abroad. A certain chance to join the military research of fatigue in pilots was soon lost by the occupation of France and Kruta left for Great Britain at the last moment. He became a physician with the Czech troops of RAF and carried out this mission with uttermost responsibility, too. Nevertheless he did not forget his goal, to get back to research work. His wish came true after two years. He was assigned to the Research Institute of the Ministry of Home Security in Oxford. The subject was completely new to him, physiological problems of nutrition with respect to the war-tormented populations. Kruta soon became a recognised expert in this field, advisor to the Czechoslovak government in exile, member of foremost institutions which planned and later accomplished the post-war assistance to occupied countries (e.g. UNRRA, FAO).
Shortly after the war and getting together with his wife and son, Kruta took up his pre-war position at the Faculty of Medicine in Prague. His main role, however, was to manage the operation of UNRRA at the Ministry of Health which included the organisation of setting up the first Czechoslovak penicillin plant. In spite of being very successful, Kruta considered these activities only temporary. Experimental work attracted him more and more. But it was a slow and crooked path deviated all the time by administrative work. Heading two newly established Departments of Physiology, one at the Institute of Sport Medicine in Prague (in 1946) the second at the Faculty of Medicine in Hradec Králové (in 1948) and reading lectures in the whole width and depth of medical physiology, consumed all his energy.
Kruta was able to gradually settle his own laboratory and a team of co-workers only in Brno where he appeared unexpectedly as the head of the Department of Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Masaryk University in 1951. He immediately appeared in the focus of the academic life but his early years were all but easy. On one hand, he was earning great respect due to his high principles, courage and erudition. But on the other, his past in Great Britain, close ties to France and unconcealed opinion irritated the political forces in command. Kruta remained firm and put all his efforts into intense scientific work. Also due to waning era of Stalinism, his opponents gradually got silenced.
In 1957, Kruta returned to his fortunate pre-war subject which became once again quite actual. His team advanced to the verge of molecular physiology and won international esteem. In addition, Kruta was kept busy by writing textbooks, by increasing editorial work and by organising scientific societies and their meetings.
Vladislav Kruta´s life was characteristic by enormous intensity of international contacts. He did not give up a single opportunity to visit a congress or workshop abroad. In his opinion personal contacts were essential nutrients of science. Indeed, he was able to maintain these contacts even across the well sealed border since all the invitations from distinguished institutions could hardly be ignored. Great many of foreign scientists also came to visit Kruta in his department.
From the very beginning of his career, Kruta was deeply interested in history of physiology, namely in two great persons of Czech science, Georgius Procháska (1749 – 1820) and Jan Evangelista Purkyně (Purkinje) (1787 – 1869). Kruta wrote besides many papers also outstanding monoghraphs about both men. He introduced Procháska to the scientific community as a pioneer of modern concept of nerve function and discovered many hitherto unknown facts about Purkyně. He was the editor of all post-war volumes of Opera omnia J.E. Purkyně (Vol.V – XIII). It was Kruta´s merit that the university in Brno got the name J.E. Purkyně as an uncontestable substitute for the name Masaryk which was abrogated by the communists. On the occasion of Purkyně´s centenary in 1969, Kruta organised an extremely successful international symposium in Prague.
By that time, Kruta definitely became one of the most distinguished persons at the university and, besides his tutor V. Laufberger, the most prominent physiologist in the country. He was the secretary of Associacion des Physiologistes for Czechoslovakia (1946 – 1979) and its president (1971 –1972), chairman of the Czechoslovak Physiological Society (1959 – 1961), of the Czech Physiological Society (1968 – 1970), of the Czechoslovak Biological Society (1963 – 1965), member of the International Society of Physiological Sciences, Americal History of Science Society, French Associacion Internationalle d´Histoire de la Medicine and German Akademia Leopoldina. Kruta also served as Chief Editor of Scripta Medica for 20 years and sat in a number of local and foreign editorial boards.
In June 1968, Kruta was among the first signataries of the manifesto 2000 Words, which was labeled counterrevolutionary by the ruling Communist Party. In the coming months he was exposed to enormous pressure to revoke but he refused to do so. He was dismissed and retired. His name was put into pillory – namely in Brno – and condemned to oblivion. Even this time Kruta did not resign. He concentrated all his energy to completion of his historiographic work. Except a proposed comprehensive monograph on J.E. Purkyně, he accomplished all his plans.
Vladislav Kruta remains an example of a true investigator, a patriot with deep social feeling and a cosmopolite. His misfortune was understanding freedom and democracy differently from the official course. He never observed personal avail. His only, never betrayed incitement was the search for truth and articulating the truth.