Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 182-185. (Budapest, 2003)

KÖZLEMÉNYEK - COMMUNICATIONS - MUZUR, Amir: Hungarian doctors and the „Golden Age" (1884-1914) of Opatija (Croatia). (Magyar orvosok és Abbázia „aranykora") (1884-1914)

HUNGARIAN DOCTORS AND THE "GOLDEN AGE" (1884-1914) OF OPATIJA (CROATIA) AMIR MUZUR Opatija (Abbázia) has primarily been (or, at least, has been considered as such) an Austrian miracle. The building of Crikvenica in 1888, advocated by the Graz naturalist Johannes Frischauf? was supposed to launch a Hungarian counterpart to the Austrian Opatija. In spite of abundant support by the Hungarian part of the Monarchy, however, (carried out by the Hungarian Government of Rijeka, personally by the Croat Ban Khuen-Héderváry), the project chronically was tagging after its Austrian model. Friedrich Schüler, the directorgeneral of the Viennese Südbahngesellschaft, was investing enormous sums into the development of Opatija, the aristocratic circles were spreading the voice about the romantic Adriatic oasis, and, finally, Professor Julius Glax, the famous balneologist, put the new Kurort on its feet. Glax, however, was not at all the first foreign physician with a private practice in Opatija: the primacy belongs to the Hungarian Albert Szemére. Born in a Jewish family in 1846 in Gyoma, he graduated in Vienna in 1871, and arrived to Opatija in 1884, a year after he had changed his original family name, Steiner. As a specialist for "the diseases of the chest, the throat, and the nerves''' (according to another source, he was also a gynecologist), he was to live and receive patients in Villa Szemére (or Villa Paola, named after his wife; present address V. C. Emina 5), whereas for summers he kept his earlier practice at Karlovy Vary (now in the Czech Republic). Szemére supported the renomé of both health resorts •— i.e. Opatija and Karlovy Vary — by writing propagandiste popular-scientific monographs on them. Otherwise, he was not especially active in Opatija's public and medical life and, in the same way he had entered into it, he silently disappeared from here after the Great War (he died in 1922, waiting for the Italian citizenship).

3 It seems that he was planning to leave as early as 1908, since in that year, he put his Villa on sale to the Health-Resort Committee (Kurkommission): his offer might have been declined due to high price he was requiring for: half a million Austrian crowns. A certain Sándor Szemere, who was probably Albert Szemere's descendant, was to become the director-general of the Rijeka oil refinery 1 Cf. MatcjCic, Radmila. "Podaci o razvoju Crikvenice u klimatsko i ljeőilisno-kupalisno mjesto zabiljezeni u rijeCkom tisku." In: Ars Aesculapii: Prilozi za povijest zdravstvene /culture Rijeke i Hrvatskog primorja [Ars Aesculapii: Contributions to the history of sanitary culture of Rijeka and Croatian Littoral], edited by Radmila MatejCic and Mariján Matejcic, 185-95. Rijeka: ICR, 1982. " Szinnyei, József, ed. Magyar írók élete és munkái. Bp., Hornyánszky. 1909. 3 Drzavni arhiv Rijeka (DAR) [Rijeka State Archives]. JU-8, box 74.