The history of the First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, is one of continuous research tasks of the Institute for the History of Medicine and Foreign Languages, and the biographies of its members are in turn one of its "foundation stones". The book follows up on older books of this kind, primarily the Biographical Dictionary of the Faculty of Medicine in Prague, 1348–1939, published in two volumes in 1988 and 1993, and the Biographisches Lexikon der Deutschen Medizinischen Fakultät in Prag 1883–1945, published in 1998. All of these volumes represent an important part of the history of the faculty and university.
This dictionary begins in the year 1945, while the end is tied to the symbolic number eight for the history of the university (1348 – the foundation of Charles University, 1848/49 – university reforms, impact of 1948 on the history of the university). The first volume includes figures whose last names begin with the letters A–L. It also contains a list of departments of the Faculty of Medicine in Prague, reflecting the historical development of the faculty’s inner structure.