Gods (Bogowie)

Zbigniew Religa is a young ambitious doctor who has just come back from a residency in the U.S. Back home, he intends to apply the latest techniques in transplantology, but is blocked by restrictions in the People’s Republic of Poland. The old ward chiefs do not allow their younger colleagues to operate and hospital authorities ban any innovations. Even when Religa opens his own clinic and gains some independence, he cannot escape the same problems: the communist government declines equipment funding and medicine becomes the victim of politics. The uncompromising doctor takes the medical establishment by storm and creates his own rules, but pays a high price for his dreams and ambitions.


The gods of the title are three Polish cardiac surgeons who, under the leadership of maverick Religa, performed the first heart transplants in Poland in the mid 1980s. Dr. Zbigniew Religa (1938-2009) went into politics, ran for president and was the Polish Minister of Health between 2005 and 2007.