Jerko Machiedo

Jerko Machiedo was a Croatian and politician and physician.

Biography

Machiedo studied medicine at the University of Graz. He earned his doctoral degree there in 1901. Following military service in Zadar and further training at a clinic in Graz, Machiedo was first employed as the substitute town physician in Ston in early 1902. Later that year, he was hired as the municipal physician in his hometown of Hvar. Machiedo retained that position until 1909. In 1907, he was elected the deputy president of the Chamber of Physicians of Dalmatia. He married Tereza Pinkava and they had sons Dušan and Dimitrije, and daughter Milica. Dimitrije's son became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2014.

In 1908, Machiedo was elected a representative in the Diet of Dalmatia on the ticket of the . The provincial government administered the region in the run-up to the arrival of Allies of World War I and their occupation of the eastern Adriatic in 1918. Following arrival of Italian troops to Zadar, Machiedo was placed under house arrest. In early 1919, he was exiled by the Italian authorities to the island of Sardinia and then to the area of Ancona before being returned to Zadar. After the city of Zadar was awarded to Italy under the Treaty of Rapallo, Machiedo left Zadar and moved to nearby Šibenik, then in the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

In the interwar period, Machiedo took employment in the Šibenik hospital. He worked there at various posts, including as the hospital director, from 1922 until retirement in 1941. In that period, he also pursued politics as a member of the Democratic Party. Following the 1928 assassination in the Assembly of Yugoslavia when the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party Stjepan Radić was fatally shot and the introduction of the dictatorship in Yugoslavia in 1929, Machiedo switched allegiance to the HSS. In 1931, after assassination of king Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille, Machiedo was questioned by the authorities due to his remarks on the assassination and briefly transferred to work in Knin hospital.
Despite formal retirement, Machiedo kept working in his family home in Hvar as one of only two physicians left on the island of Hvar during the World War II. In that period, Machiedo provided free medical treatment to wounded Yugoslav Partisans. As the sole physician in his native town, he kept his practice open until 1952, when a municipal medical centre opened. Even then, the medical centre borrowed Machiedo's X-ray machine as the only one available to them until 1955.