Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 57-59. (Budapest, 1971)
Előszó
Tn 1969 we celebrated an outstanding event in the history of medical traiA ning in Hungary. Two hundred years before that, on 9th November 1769, Queen Maria Theresa supplemented the University of Nagyszombat, founded in 1635, and transferred to the capital (Buda) in 1777, with a medical faculty. The legal successor of the transferred university is the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest, together with the Semmelweis Medical University. The anniversary was marked by the appearance of the 1969 volume (Nos. 51-53) of Orvostörténeti Közlemények (Comm. Hist. Artis Med.), all the articles dealing with the past of Hungarian medical training. In the same year a conference of the medical historians of Hungary and Slovakia was a good example of scientific cooperation, of the effort to understand each other better and to respect each other's opinions. The fact that the cradle of the Hungarian university was at Nagyszombat, on a territory that became part of Czechoslovakia following the first world war, at one of the towns (Trnava) of today's Slovakia, this did not become a source of antagonisms but the symbol of combined efforts in the examination of the common past. In the conference of Szomolány (Smolenice) held on 9-10 th October 1969, and organized by the science-historical section of the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, there were Hungarians among the invited who spoke. Not much later, at the anniversary session of the Semmelweis Medical University and the Hungarian Society for Medical History (November 11, 1969) there was a Slovak representative among the Hungarian speakers. A Slovak publication will give an account of the two meetings in Slovak, while we are publishing their material or the articles serving as basis for the lectures in Hungarian, German, French, English and Russian respectively. These lectures present a good picture of the conditions in higher education and medical training in historical Hungary, show the difficulties that existed, and the plans for reform by the best elements of the society. It follows from the nature of such conferences that articles and lectures of a different nature are published together, popularizing summaries alternate with studies based on primary sources. Certain répétions, the presentation of identical facts or events could not be completely eliminated from the works of the various authors.
