The Stalinization of medical practice demanded an explicit focus on preventative measures, a dialectical-materialist perspective, and the direct incorporation of a “Pavlovian” physiological approach which embraced the unity of man and environment. These imperatives aligned smoothly with various public health trends from the Interwar period in Czechoslovakia, and the effort to create a Soviet-style state hygiene service encountered a small but ready cohort of physicians whose existing structuralist and environmental health concerns found augmentation within the precepts of Marxist-Leninist medicine. Rather than suspending or eschewing Western traditions, a socialist approach to public health revitalized and empowered long-held progressive critiques of therapy-centered medicine, the uncontrolled nature of industrialization, and the unsanitary state of Czechoslovakia's living and working environment.

The precepts of Pavlovian medicine, based largely on an amalgamation of dialectical-materialist philosophy and the theory of conditioned reflexes, placed the source of internal biophysical change in the external environment: population health was primarily an outcome of a society's living and working conditions. These natural, physical, and material influences therefore required hygienic transformation in order to enhance the health of the proletariat, eradicate the sources of illness and disease, and develop salubrious conditions for work and daily life. Although this perspective moved Czechoslovak hygienists away from the socio-behavioral focus of most contemporary post-war public health work in the West, there was consistent interest in more structuralist Western scientific research and medical practices in the areas of toxicology, occupational health and hygiene, ergonomics, physiology, environmental pollution, and sanitary design. There was little hesitation to site foreign, bourgeois sources on these issues, and better established medical journals never ceased producing abstracts in English or French throughout the “high Stalinist” period of scientific intervention (1945-1953). The result was a medical discipline which did not experience an interruption by the communist milieu so much as a refraction and magnification of specific yet traditional interests and aims.