a1_This study aims to present the physician Johann Melitsch (1763–1837) as a courageous reformer who presented a specific alternative to the étatist model of healthcare reforms implemented by the Habsburg monarchy in the 18th century. As obstetrics was the focus of Melitsch’s reform activities, the paper also contributes to the broader issue of the professionalisation of obstetrics at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1780s, Joseph II decided to use the assets of the secularised monasteries and hospitals to form a state complex of various health and social care facilities in the capitals of the Habsburg “provinces”. Where conditions and proximity to the university allowed, the first real “clinics”, i.e. hospitals linked to the teaching of medicine (and therefore science), were established: this was the case, for example, in Vienna and Prague. General hospitals formed the core of these complexes; maternity hospitals were also built, primarily for unmarried mothers, to prevent infanticide, but also as a source of female bodies for young medical students, who otherwise generally did not have the opportunity to learn about pregnancy and childbirth. At the same time, a young doctor who had just finished medical school in Prague, the twenty-fouryear- old Johann Melitsch, the son of a cabinet-maker, decided to undertake another project: a Privatentbindungsanstalt, ie. private outpatient maternity clinic. It was designed for married but poor women and also offered the opportunity of midwifery practice to medical students. Thanks to a family inheritance and his wife’s dowry, he was indeed able to found such an institution. And with donations from wealthy patrons from the nobility, he was able to provide small financial rewards or medicines to his patients. His assistants were students. and a2_Melitsch later extended his outpatient care, which was also improved by the “district doctors”, to sick women and children in general and thus offered a counterpart to the “stationary” type of state general hospital. In 1793, he was finally appointed professor at the Prague Faculty of Medicine – but only after the intervention of Emperor Francis I himself, who also granted this institution a “public right”. In 1795 Melitsch drew up a proposal – also probably the first in the Habsburg monarchy – for health insurance for low-income segments of the population. However, this system was never put into practice. In this predominantly Catholic monarchy, where hospitals had hitherto operated mainly on a church or municipal basis and where there was a clear tendency in Melitsch’s time to create a purely state-run health service, this was an exceptional case. The paper is also a contribution to the broader issue of the professionalisation of midwifery at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Besides that, Melitsch is considered to be the first doctor in the Czech lands to perform a successful caesarean section in which both mother and child survived.
Starting with the traditional dichotomy of two views of the relation between criticism and art - "criticism as art" and "criticism based on detachment" - this study seeks to show both standpoints to be part of a single complex of issues and tensions associated with the functional differentiation within literary communication at the turn of 18th and 19th century. This approach is based on Niklas Luhmann’s system theory, applied (with something of a twist) by Siegfried Schmidt to literature. After introducing the problem of functional differentiation within the literary system in Bohemia, the study presents many different historical conceptions of the relation of art and criticism observable in discussions at the turn of 18th and 19th century in Bohemia. I then focus on the notion of "genius" in these discussions, which played an important role in the development of the concept of "criticism as art". In the following three parts, the study investigates the differentiation of critical praxis: the genesis of "artistic criticism" characterized by hermeneutics and its form-reflecting approach, and the ongoing usage of artistic genres in criticism. The last part focuses on a specific critical genre of the period, the satirical vision, and its transformation as a consequence of the differentiation of the literary system., Václav Smyčka., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy