* personal profile:
In the years 1929-1947, he worked as the head of the orthopaedic department at the Bata hospital. For the company Bata, he was a key person not only in the hospital, his professional studies became the basis for the correct shaping of shoe-lasts for shoe production. The Bata company began to actively focus on the topic of healthy footwear. Shoe-lasts, which support health-friendly footwear, were a basic prerequisite for the improvement of orthopedically suitable footwear. Doctor Račanský is the author of many professional studies, he led dozens of researches, he also published his knowledge in the book Foot Care Textbook, which was published in 1933 and is still considered to be of high quality and timeless. His studies became the basis for the development of the field of pedicures not only here, but also worldwide. It is still possible to search for the information that thanks to the activities of the Orthopaedic Department and the pedicure activities of the Bata company, the largest mapping of foot defects in the world was created. In the years 1947-1967, František Račanský worked as the director of the Jedlička Institute and the institutional orthopaedic hospital in Liberec. He died in 1980.
František Račanský, 1940 (SOkA Zlín, o. č. 40261, p. č. 3)
Josef Vaňhara also writes about it in his book The story of one man and one city: Industrially produced footwear took into account the basic anatomy of the foot and provided a choice of sizes as well as different widths for each size; however, it inherited customers from a more recent time, who often grew up and still had to walk in shoes not according to the requirements of their feet, but simply according to the shoes that were available, because their acquisition was an expensive and difficult. The unfortunate and now unknown consequence of this were all kinds of foot defects, sometimes with toes that had grown wide and a flattened arch from shoes that were too big, other times with crooked toes, enlarged joints and toes growing one over the other from shoes that were too narrow and too solid, in addition to all kinds of painful pressure sores, ingrown nails, etc. The effort to improve such a dismal condition, which people in Bata stores encountered day in and day out, led to the opening of another, orthopaedic department of the hospital. Its activities, managed from the beginning by the Chief Dr. František Račanský, developed in two directions; received and treated patients with orthopaedic diseases within its scope, but at the same time, through a network of thousands of Bata stores, it created an organization of practical foot care throughout the country.
From the Bata press: The foot care department is to be expanded in the near future to include a medical consultation room, under the leadership of the Chief pedologist at Bata hospital, Dr. Račanský, who shall give advice and treatment in various diseases and defects of the legs and feet. By establishing a medical consultation, footwear technology and science will meet on a common field, and their joint work can be of great importance for the footwear industry.
