Tradition and modernity

It was founded in 1945 as Państwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich (National Medical Publishing House). The company was renamed Wydawnictwa Lekarskie PZWL when it was privatised in 1993 and in 1998 it became part of the PWN Group of Companies, one of the largest publishing organisations in Poland. PZWL produces over 130 new and revised titles annually.   The output of the company since it was founded is enormous and runs to over 13,600 titles with a total print number to date that exceeds 320 million copies.  

For over sixty years generations of Polish doctors and other medical workers have come to rely on PZWL publications in their training and professional life. The Company publishes for a range of medical professionals: literature for physicians, dentists, pharmacologists and ancillary medical personnel, textbooks for undergraduate and post-graduate students, monographs, lexicons, encyclopaedias, printed and electronic publications (including instructional films and dictionaries on CDs). PZWL also produces a wide range of high-quality books and handbooks on key medical topics for non-medical audiences.   

From the time of its foundation, PZWL established the highest standards of quality for its publications which are prepared by the leading medical authorities in Poland, doctors, scientists and translators. The company collaborates closely with all the most important Polish scientific centres and medical institutions, including the Institute of Oncology, Institute of Cardiology, Institute of Mother and Child, Child Health Centre and the Institute of Food and Nutrition.

In 2005 the Polish Association of Authors of Medical Books, an organization representing the most distinguished medical authorities in the country, designated two books published by Wydawnictwo Lekarskie PZWL as the best medical books of the 20th Century. They were Nauka o chorobach wewnętrznych  (The Science of Internal Diseases) by Witold Orłowski and Anatomia człowieka (The Human Anatomy) by Adam Bochenek and Michał Reicher. The latter is the only anatomy textbook that has been in print, updated and revised for nearly a century and, with sales of over 700,000 copies, it is a timeless bestseller.

Other PZWL titles with outstanding reputations include Mały atlas anatomiczny (Concise Anatomy Atlas) by Ryszard Aleksandrowicz, Podręczny słownik medyczny angielsko-polski i polsko-angielski (Concise English-Polish and Polish-English Medical Dictionary) by Przemysław and Piotr Słomski and 250 badań laboratoryjnych. Kiedy zlecać. Jak interpretować (250 Laboratory Tests and Examinations) by René Caquet.    In popular medicine, Domowy poradnik medyczny (A Medical Handbook for Home Use) by Kazimierz Janicki (ed.) is a major bestseller having sold over 500 000 copies.

Internationally, PZWL enjoys an outstanding  reputation and has close working relationships with such major medical publishing houses as Masson of France, Georg Thieme Verlag, Springer-Verlag and Schattauer of Germany, Elsevier of the UK and the USA,  McGraw-Hill and Lippincott Williams & Wilkins of the USA, Blackwell Publishing and Oxford University Press of the UK.

We offer international customers licences for our publications: Agnieszka Piotrowska – tel./fax 0-22 695-44-97, e-mail: agnieszka.piotrowska@pzwl.pl