Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 45. (Budapest, 1968)

TANULMÁNYOK - József Antall: Sándor Lumniczer and the Medical School of Pest (Angol nyelvű közl.)

is illustrated by an exellent figure. Knowing Lumniczer's numerous drawings we may safely assign that to himself. The plastic surgical works of Balassa will appear nearly two decades later (New Operative Methods concerning Nosecorrections, Pest, 1863. Plastic Operations Illustrated with Atlas 1867 [10].) No wonder that Balassa sent him to Vienna with excellent recommendations, where he became the student of Schuh in operating surgery (1845— 47). The second Viennese school [11] (Rokitansky, Skoda, etc.) had the same great effect on Lumniczer as on Semmelweis or Markusovszky. Schuh, too, belonged to this school, he was the first Austro-German surgeon who put chirurgy on equal rank with internal medicine, on anatomical, physiological and pathologic anatomical basis, including laboratory analyses. Schuh made friends with the well-educated young man, who was competent in more than one language [12]. At that time Markusovszky—a student of Wattman—and Semmelweis also stayed in Vienna. Their life-long friendship started there, but they may have met earlier as they were contemporaries. Who knows what heated medical discussions led Lumniczer to his laconic statement, perhaps an early negation of puerperal fever as an idependent disease: "Febris puerperalis non existit". This meaningful but not expounded thesis was put down in his doctoral dissertation, three years before Semmelweis's great discovery (1847), the recognition of the identity of puerperal fever and sepsis. (It is possible that is was the adoption of Theodor Helm's and Franz Schuh's similar opinion (1838—39) [13]). Lumniczer's statement is, of course, nothing comparing to Semmelweis's epochmaking discovery, but it shows the weight of the problem, the atmosphere surrounding the pathbreakers and their feeling of responsibility. The invention of etherization had a very considerable part in the development of surgery. Some months after its first application in the United States by Morton and Warren, in one of the old rooms of the Pest university Balassa exposed the new method, and after that in order to demonstrate its application he "had his assistant, Markusovszky make a lithotomy". The description of that notable event in 1847 is from Korányi, which he personally attended as a medical student. (Markusovszky had already tried the method on himself in Vienna, under Schuh). At the side of Balassa there stood the great hopes of Hungarian medical science: Endre Sebestyén Kovács, János Bókay, Arányi, and also Lumniczer, who had returned from Vienna to be present at the first demonstration of "aether-narcosis" in Hungary [14]. That was before he visited Paris, London, Zürich on a study-tour on course of which he got acquainted with the most modern institutes, researchers and physicians of that time. He was in no hurry to return, although in 1846 and in 1847 he applied to Ignác Stáhly for appointment to be assistant on the department of practical surgery at the Pest university. He made 24 enclosures to his application, in which the most outstanding professors from Pest (e. g. Balassa) and from Vienna (Rokitansky, Hyrtl, etc.) testified his distinction [15].