Vlasta Kálalová

Who was Vlasta Kálalová?

Vlasta Kálalová Di Lotti was a Czech physician interested in tropical diseases and entomology. Her father Jan Kálal was a teacher and zealous breeder of rabbits. He was very supportive of her education. Simultaneously, she studied medicine, Arabic and Persian at Charles University in Prague. She graduated with honours in 1922. Female surgeons were quite extraordinary in Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s. After attending a lecture on exotic parasitology given by professor Jaroslav Hlava, she became interested in tropical diseases and their treatment. Later she focused on examining the so-called “Baghdad boils”. She established the Czechoslovak Surgical Institute in Baghdad, where she worked both as a director and surgeon between 1925 and 1932. She was soon nicknamed “Albert Schweitzer in a skirt”. She was so respected that she even treated some members of the Iraqi Royal Family. In Iraq she started collecting various kinds of local insects which she preserved and sent to the Czech National Museum. During the years spent in Baghdad, she enriched the museum with 500,000 specimens; some of them had not been explored before and were named after her. She married Italian Giorgio Di Lotti and they had two children – Radbor and Drahomila Lydie. However, she was still obsessed with work; she did not go on maternity leave and continued to work in the hospital. Later she became ill with feared dengue fever which confined her to bed for a few months. In 1932, she came back to Czechoslovakia where she recovered.