My wife told me that it seemed I actually loved medicine more than her
Ladislav Král was born on 17 May 1921 in the village of Petrovice, which lies about 25 kilometres from Hradec Králové. He spent a part of his childhood in Říčany near Prague, where his father worked as a supervisor of pension inspections. After his death Ladislav and his mother and older sister moved to Petrovice, where he attended lower primary school. He gained further education at the town school (upper primary school) in Týniště nad Orlicí, and then switched to the third junior year of Rašín Grammar School in Hradec Králové. He graduated in 1940. In his youth he was chief of the Sokol sports association in Petrovice, he was also a member of YMCA in Hradec Králové, he played the violin and was also active in amateur theatre. Later on he was a member of the dance orchestra in Třebochovice and in Hradec Králové. During the war he worked as a farm hand on his grandfather’s farm. At the same time he held the post of secretary at the town hall. It was his job to allocate the compulsory quotas of submitted agricultural produce, together with the counting of cattle and poultry. In 1945 he applied to the Faculty of Medicine in Prague. To enable his application to be accepted, he joined the Communist Party. He left the party in the late 1960s. He graduated in 1951. After his studies he was given a place in the Liberec hospital, in the Department of Infectious Diseases. He focused on this area of specialisation for his whole life. During his compulsory military service he was allocated to the military infection clinic in Hradec Králové. While there he focused on infectious diseases that affect the nervous system. He gained second degree certification for infectious diseases and gained the position of assistant. In 1970 he became permanent head doctor and remained in that position until his retirement in 1982. He worked another eight years as a children’s doctor at a health clinic in Luže-Košumberk.
