MUDr. Slavoj Brichcín

* 1935

  • "Initially, when I found out at my graduation - and that graduation was terribly strange - I had straight A's in those four subjects. So I was very surprised that suddenly a member of the Communist Party, unknown to us, came to the matriculation committee that evaluated our performance at the matriculation. We did not know him at all. Moreover, he messed with us there. So whoever wanted to study chemistry, for example, was sent to a technical field, and technology, on the other hand, was decided to study anything in the field of natural sciences. And I thought I could study literature, and was sent to the medical faculty in Pilsen instead."

  • "For example, when I wanted to move, already as a doctor, from one region to another, it was arranged like this - piece by piece. This means that one had to negotiate with someone who wanted to move from the South Bohemian Region to the Pilsen Region and vice versa. So, when I managed to find a doctor who was interested in the transition, they allowed us to make the exchange - piece by piece - to take place. So we were a kind of a managed commodity, you could say."

  • "However, we experienced liberation by the American army a little earlier than, for example, the Red Army reached Prague in May 1945. It was a very pleasant meeting, because the American soldiers were well equipped and materially supplied. They gave the children chewing gums, all kinds of canned goods, and chocolate from their stocks and drove us up on jeeps. And there I saw a black man for the first time when I was 10 years old in 1945 on the Domažlice square... Moreover, it was such a nice army. The nice thing about it was that it left the republic in time and didn't stay here as an occupying army."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha 8, 08.04.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:15:56
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

We organized a professional sexological conference so that we did not have to go to demonstrations

Slavoj Brichcín when recording an interview with pupils from the Stories of our Neighbors project (via an online video call)
Slavoj Brichcín when recording an interview with pupils from the Stories of our Neighbors project (via an online video call)
photo: Autorský tým PNS

Slavoj Brichcín was born on February 7, 1935 in the village of Čermná in Domažlicko region. As a child from a teacher´s family, he started going to school at the age of five. After elementary school, he studied at the gymnasium, which he graduated with a high school diploma at the age of 17. Instead of his dream faculty of philosophy, he aimed for medicine. Under the influence of his brother - a clinical psychologist - he decided to specialize in psychiatry. He first worked professionally in the largest domestic hospital in Dobřany, then in České Budějovice and Prague. He contributed significantly to the development of the field of sexology. At the end of the 1980s, he became the head of the Psychiatric Hospital in Bohnice, where he also initiated the Bohnice Sex Days professional conference.