Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 66-68. (Budapest, 1973)
Spielmann József: Ave atque vale — Valeriu Bologa professzor emlékezetére
történészek nagy, nemzetközi seregét. Beírta a fiatal román orvostörténeti mozgalmat a nemzetközi társaság aranykönyvébe, megkoronázta életművét, átnyújthatta a részt vevő delegációknak a szerkesztésében, tanítványai közreműködésével megírt átfogó művét, a Nemzetközi orvostudomány történetét. (Ekkor még nem tudta, s nem is fogja soha megtudni, hogy azokban a napokban, amíg ő a kolozsvári klinikán a halállal vívódott, a francia Orvosi Akadémia művét egyik nagydíjával tüntette ki.) Úgy érzem, akkor, egy délután erejéig, boldog volt. Hitte, hogy elmondhatja latin őseivel együtt, megkoronázta életművét, méltósággal öregedett meg. így láttam behunyt szemem mögött, azon a novemberi délelőttön halott mesteremet, míg ő a rideg ravatalon feküdt... s magamban a főhajtás, a hála és a búcsú igéit tagoltam: „Ave atque vale!" Summary He was my teacher on two grounds. First, as a student in the thirties, I attended his enthralling lectures on the history of medicine. His reasoning was convincing, his arguments clear, his dynamism carried his audience away. His passion reached its peak when he spoke on the history of medicine in his own country. Here everything what he said was the outcome of his own researches, the result of work covering many decades. He became my teacher for the second time more than twenty years ago when the teaching of medical history became my profession. My first dutiful steps took me to the third floor of the institute in Kolozsvár bearing the name of Pasteur, to the department of Professor Bologa. The first surprise came right after the greetings. The professor opened his cabinet and took out a card with my name on its cover, which listed my writings published in various periodicals on the history of medicine, with underlinings and question marks in red pencil on the margins. And then right there in an informal way he pointed out the mistakes in my publications which all went back to a common source: informations obtained second-hand. "The historian of science should draw from the original sources, peruse the original works, turn to archival data", he said. "To borrow any data from somebody else without checking it is the most condemnable form of intellectual indolence." He warned me against putting my hand into too many things, being encyclopaedic in appearance, against spectacular but dangerous "productiveness". "Dear colleague' f , he continued, "do not act like the child who was admitted in the sweet-chop and lost his head. He would eat all the sweets at once, not thinking of the consequent indigestion. Gluttony in a scholar is even more condemnable. There is no creative production without self-discipline ." Twenty years later this conversation sounds like his "ars poetica". Later, when I came to know him better, I saw that he applied this selfdiscipline, the restriction of the scope of his research, most strictly to himself, in his own work.
