Amid the nineteenth-century economic liberalism, care for the poor, which had until then been sporadically and unsystematically provided by public and private institutions through various measures and activities, no longer offered an adequate response to the growing social crisis. The new economic system clearly needed to incorporate a strategy aimed at finding global solutions to social issues. The article discusses the formulation of principles aimed at regulating relations between individuals and social institutions in Ljubljana by focusing on persons and the system which provided the socially disadvantaged groups with basic social and medical care during the First World War and in the decade that followed.