Popular health education and venereal diseases in Croatia between two World Wars

The article presents the research of popular health education on venereal diseases in Croatia between the World Wars. In the inter-war period, the traditional plain approach to popular health education was replaced with new, complex meth-ods, which became the basis for the modem work in this field. New social medicine ideas and new health politics, as well as the new founded institutions such as the School of Public Health in Zagreb and different anti-venereal outpatient facilities, were crucial for changing popular health education after World War I. Based mostly on archival documents, this article explores popular health education as a vehicle for identification of attitudes and concepts within the medical community. Ambivalence in the perception of essential approaches towards popular heath education is elaborated on the ground of controversies within prominent medical representatives. With the support of new technologies, public health methods in the inter-war period matured in form and complexity. Despite various new methods, which made their way into different parts of everyday life, the subject matter of venereal diseases was treated through a limited number of methods due to the conservative attitudes of society, as well as resistance of many physicians.