Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 66-68. (Budapest, 1973)

TANULMÁNYOK - Székely Sándor: Az 1876-os közegészségügyi törvény előkészítéséről (angol nyelven)

The final text of the bill was signed by Kálmán Tisza on October 30. 1875, and it was soon submitted to the special committees of the House of Commons, and on February 23-24, 1876 to the House of Commons itself. The Lower House passed the bill with minor modifications, the Upper House ratified it, and so on April 8, 1876, the law was promulgated. With this the Act came into force. It is a law which has ever since been proudly cited and referred to by health administrators, by medical historians and by all those who know its provisions and the times in which it was enacted. The structure of the Act is the following: Part I. Public Health Measures 1. General rules, 1-8; 2. Measures for the promotion and preservation of public health, 9-18; 3. Measures in regard to children and schools, 19-35; 4. On state gaols and prisons, 36-38; 5. Aid in cases of accidents, 39-42; 6. Medical practice, 43-48; 7. Midwifery practice, 49-51; 8. Quackery, 52-55; 9. Hospitals and therapeutic institutions, 56-70; 10. Lunatic asylums, 71-76; 11. Railway an shipping sanitation, 77-79; 12. Epidemics and contagions, 80-91; 13. Protective smallpox vaccination, 92-99; 14. Medicinal baths and mineral waters, 100-108; 15. Proceedings with corpses, on burial and cemeteries, 109-123; 16. Pharmaceutics, 124-138. Part II. Public Health Service 1. Public health service for communities, 139-152; 2. Public health service for districts and municipalities, 153-154; 3. Centre, 165-176. The present-day public may be misled to some extent by the name of the law; the comment was often made that Act XIV of 1876 "treated only public health". It was in fact collective health, the protection of the community's health, that was the main objective of the framers of the law; but, as in the early part of the second half of the last century public health just began to be distinguished as a separate discipline, the meaning of health protection, of preventive medicine was also different then from what it is today. Actually, all of health and medicine was included, just as Act XIV of 1876 deals in fact with health as a whole from the point of view of safeguarding collective health. This will be obvious if we go through the paragraphs of the Act and stop for a moment considering some of them. This will in fact enable the reader to make some appraisal of the Act. Paragraph 1 states. "The management of public health is within the scope of State administration." As public health was widely interpreted, extensive scope was opened for health administration. (Later it will be seen that scope for action was not granted to the state apparatus for health, and consequently the "management" mentioned in Paragraph 1 could not have been direct.) In actual practice, the scope existed, but there was no possibility for instigating effective measures. • As in those days general mortality was the only gauge of health conditions, Paragraph 9 declared that wherever mortality was considerably in excess of the average (in periods free of epidemics) the reasons were to be investigated, and,