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

TANULMÁNYOK - Bugyi Balázs: Az iparegészségügy kezdetei Magyarországon (1928-ig) (angol nyelven)

VI. All the world was shocked at that time by the emergence of phosphorus necrosis. The hungarian chemist János Irinyi announced between 1820 and 1830 his invention of the phosphorus match which soon spread to many countries so that match-making from yellow phosphorus took its beginning on a world scale. Lorinser of Vienna was the first in 1845 to report cases diagnosed as phosphorus necrosis of the jaw; he also identified the horrible, deformative, painful and often lethal illness as a specific kind of occupational disease. In Hungary the first cases of phosphorus necrosis were presented on 7th June 1851 in the Royal Medical Society of Pest whose leading board then addressed a petition to aulic councillor Karl v. Geringer, the civil governor of Hungary under Habsburg absolutism (Civil-Commissar von Ungarn) with the request to take suitable steps of prevention—without any particular measure to have followed. In 1803 Prof. Sándor Lumniczer in the same Medical Society demonstrated his mode of surgical intervention and commented on the conceivable methods of operation in a case of phosphorus necrosis diagnosed in a boy aged 14 who was working in a match factory and suffered from a necrotic state of the jaw which revealed itself as an occupational disease. More cases of the same ailment were presented in 1867 by university professor of surgery Endre Kovács Sebestyén who again outlined the possible ways of surgical treatment, calling at the same time for suitable precautions to prevent more occurrences of phosphorus necrosis in the domestic match factories. Giving way to his and many other physicians' complaints, under pressure of rightfully angered public opinion, the government of political compromise of 1869 issued a decree (Home Ministry, Nr. 5089) with the object to "avoid injuries in connection with the making of phosphorus matches, ordering at the same time to provide for ventilation in the workshops of those factories and suggesting to introduce proper health preI cautions for the workers to avoid the perils of phosphorus poisoning." . . . "The medical officer and the police are bound in regular intervals of time to inspect the factories for their compliance with the ventilation and health regulations". But the decree, virtually the only one of that age to make it incumbent on a doctor (health officer) and grant him the right to undertake inspection rounds in factories, remained practically unexecuted. Following repeated demonstrations by the physicians Ernő Ercsey and Sándor Lumniczer in the 1870s, Lajos Petz read a lecture in 1881 on the subject "phosphorus inflammation of the periosteum and bone gangrene*', pointing out that from a group of 17 phosphorus necrosis patients 30% (two males and three females) died of the "craftsmen's disease" because "it had reached a much too advanced state by the time they were committed to hospital treatment." In horror-inspiring terms did he describe the conditions that p' vailed in match factories and the severely health-damaging circumstances under which their workers, mostly children with increased susceptibility for the disease, were compelled to work. Demonstrated in connection with that lecture was the dental prosthesis József Árkövy had constructed as substitution for a removed