The incredible story of Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti: Czech female surgeon, entomologist, polyglot and traveller
The name Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti might not mean very much to you – even many Czechs have not heard of her. But the woman with the exotic-sounding name was decidedly one of the most fascinating figures of the First Republic and had an incredible life story that deserves to be more widely known. Not only a female surgeon at a time when this was extremely uncommon, she was also intrepid and pioneering, setting up a clinic in Iraq in the 1920s, and was said to have been fluent in over a dozen languages.
Most of what is now known about Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti comes from a single book – Doktorka z domu Trubačů or The Doctor from the Trubač Family House, by the now-deceased biographer Ilona Borská. Jana Renner, who a few years ago published a book about pioneering Czech women who made their mark on history, which of course included the story of Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti, told Radio Prague that reading Di Lotti’s story in Ilona Borská’s biographical novel had made an impression on her as a young girl.
“I remember when I was maybe 12 or 14 years old, I was reading a book about Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti’s life by Ilona Borská and I remember being so excited – her story was unbelievable. She decided in 1919 to go to Baghdad, where she established a Czech hospital and specialised in tropical diseases. But not only this – she was an entomologist as well and did research for the National Museum and established a big collection of insects.”
Apart from her medical skills, Kálalová also had a gift for languages, and was allegedly fluent in 14 of them: English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Norwegian, Icelandic, modern Greek, Tajik and Georgian.
Little is known about Vlasta Kálalová’s early childhood (she only added the name Di Lotti after marrying her Italian husband) other than that she was born on 26 October 1896 in Bernartice, in the South Bohemian Region, and that her father, Jan Kálal, who was a teacher and described as a “zealous breeder of rabbits”, was very supportive of her education. This allowed her to go on to study medicine, Arabic and Persian at Charles University in Prague, from which she graduated with honours in 1922.
Lenka Jungmannová, who wrote a play about her life called ‘Istyklál’, told Czech Radio what she finds fascinating about her.
“Vlasta Kálalová was one of the first qualified female doctors in Czechoslovakia, and on top of that she specialised in surgery, which was extraordinary not only because she was a woman, but also because of her slight figure. What’s more, she was also very creative and energetic – she made up her mind to open a private clinic in Baghdad, which was unbelievably complicated. And on top of all that, she was extremely talented at languages – the fact that she was able to open a clinic in Baghdad was in no small part due to her very good command of Arabic and Persian.”
After attending a lecture on exotic parasitology, Kálalová became interested in tropical medicine, and later focused on the so-called “Baghdad boils”, the common name for cutaneous leishmaniasis, a parasitic skin disease transmitted by the bite of sandflies. She made up her mind to set up a clinic in Iraq, at that time still under British administration, because she wanted to practice medicine somewhere where there was insufficient healthcare and where she could continue her interest in tropical medicine. She was incredibly resourceful in gaining the necessary funds and support to make it a reality.
Jana Plodková, the actress who portrayed Vlasta Kálalová in Lenka Jungmannová’s play, says this led her to meet other important and well-known First Republic figures:
“She had this tenacity that wasn’t destructive, but enriching. When she decided to be a surgeon in Baghdad, she began to save money – she had some money saved for the journey and some for equipping the hospital. Thanks to Alice Masaryková, she was able to meet T.G. Masaryk, who was so impressed by her that he agreed for the state to financially support her endeavour, so she was given a loan, which she later paid back.”
At the time she travelled to Iraq, there were only about two hundred doctors working in the country of three million people, and several hundred people died of plague and cholera every year.
Kálalová established the Czechoslovak Surgical Institute in Baghdad, where she worked both as a director and surgeon between 1925 and 1932, initially performing surgery without a nurse or proper equipment. However, she soon earned the respect of the locals, as well as the nickname “Albert Schweitzer in a skirt”. She was so well-respected that she was even invited to the home of the Iraqi King and allowed to treat some members of the Iraqi Royal Family.
But the conditions were understandably not easy. She often had to contend with the superstitions of the locals, who believed more in spirits than in medicine. High daytime temperatures also made her work difficult, so she sometimes preferred to operate at night.
Jana Plodková says the fact that she treated women in Iraq was also something quite notable.
“What was unbelievable was that not only did she manage the hospital, she also treated women, which was not easy, because women in Iraq at that time weren’t allowed to uncover their bodies – they were often accompanied by their husbands, who wouldn’t allow them to be closely examined by a doctor.”
But Kálalová’s interests extended beyond even medicine and languages – she was also a keen entomologist. While in Iraq, she started collecting and cataloguing local insects which she preserved and sent to the Czech National Museum. During her years spent in Baghdad, she increased the museum’s collection by around 500,000 specimens. Some of them had never been discovered before and were even named after her.
Jana Plodková says that she helped to introduce the Middle East to the people of Czechoslovakia:
“She collected beetles for the National Museum, local clothing, the Mangar fish. It’s amazing that in amongst all the other things she was doing, she still managed to find time to send specimens, so that she could open up the world to Czechoslovakia a little more.”
Kálalová married the Italian Giorgio Di Lotti in 1927 while still in Iraq and added his surname to hers. The couple had two children, Radbor Kálal Di Lotti and Drahomila Lydie Kálalová Di Lotti, but apparently Kálalová was such a workaholic that she didn’t take any time off for maternity leave and continued to work in the hospital. However, this may also have been due to a lack of provision for working women with children. In a letter to one of her friends, Kálalová wrote at the time:
“Now I think it a sin if the state doesn't make a law to protect mothers, on the contrary, they fire pregnant women from service or give them three months' leave out of grace. Maybe in a few decades, the state will be free to give birth bonuses, like a country with a declining population.”
Eventually her relentless work schedule caught up with her and she fell ill with dengue fever, which confined her to her bed for a few months. In 1932, she returned with her family to her native Bernartice in South Bohemia to convalesce – a process which took the best part of four years.
Lenka Jungmannová says that on her return she wrote a memoir about her time in Baghdad, which revealed Kálalová’s creative and inventive way of using language as well as giving Jungmannová the inspiration for the name of her play:
“On returning from Baghdad, Vlasta Kálalová wrote a kind of memoir. It’s about 400 pages long, but it’s not very personal – there is a lot of travel information and data – and it hasn’t been published. It’s stored only in the archives of the Museum of Czech Literature. In this memoir, she uses the word ‘Istyklál’ to mean ‘independent woman’, saying that’s what the local people called her. I consulted Arabic scholars and they told me that that’s not the true meaning of the word, at least nowadays. But I left it there, because even in Czech she used words in her own way, she had her own expressions.”
Vlasta Kálalová di Lotti finished writing her never-published travel memoir, Přes Bospor k Tigridu (Across the Bosphorus to the Tigris) in 1936. Two years later, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, which prevented the family from being able to leave the country. Sadly, tragedy befell her a few years later, as Jungmannová describes.
“She ran the clinic for several years before returning to Czechoslovakia where she met with a tragic fate – the Nazis killed her whole family, and she was the only one to survive. But she was a tough, tenacious woman, evidently also very practical, and at the same time also very charismatic, so she didn’t lose her drive to help people.”
Kálalová lost her entire family on 8 May 1945 – in a cruel twist of fate, on the exact day that Czechoslovakia was finally being liberated from Nazi occupation. German troops shot the family, although reports differ as to how exactly the shooting occurred. Some describe it as an accident, while others say it was not accidental at all but was rather an execution. Other reports say that her husband and children were killed by the Nazis first in front of her eyes as a form of punishment. In fact, she only barely survived the shooting herself, with two bullets shot at her, making it through only because the German troops thought she was already dead.
However, she lived on, for another 26 years. In 1947, she attended an international women's conference in the United States held by Eleanor Roosevelt, where she befriended, among others, the Norwegian author Ingeborg Refling Hagen. She protested against Milada Horáková’s death sentence, the democratic politician who was executed on charges of conspiracy and treason following a Communist show trial in 1950.
She died on 15 February 1971 in Písek, in her native South Bohemia. In 1971, shortly before her death, she wrote in a letter:
"The most shameful feature of slavery is the herd bowing to those who currently hold power".
The Communists tried to erase her name from the general public consciousness, and were successful to some extent, leaving her partially forgotten. But thanks to Ilona Borská's biographical novel, her story lived on. In 1992, President Václav Havel awarded Vlasta Kálalová in memoriam with the Order of T. G. Masaryk.
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