Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 188-189. (Budapest, 2004)
KÖZLEMÉNYEK - COMMUNICATIONS - Kóczián, Mária - Kölnei, Lívia: The struggle of Gustav Schimert for the revival of homeopathy in Hungary(1908-1944).-Schimert Gusztáv küzdelme a magyar homeopátia újjáélesztéséért (1908-1944)
THE STRUGGLE OF GUSTAV SCHIMERT FOR THE REVIVAL OF HOMEOPATHY IN HUNGARY (1908-1944) MÁRIA KÓCZIÁN - LÍVIA KÖLNÉI Introduction Although Gustav Schimert was born and grew up in Transylvania in a German speaking Saxon family, he spent his active years between 1908 and 1944 mainly in Budapest. He regarded the revival of homeopathy in Hungary as his mission. Our paper is devoted to his life and work. 1. Practice in Hungary and in Germany 1908-1914 Gustav Schimert was born in Transylvania, in 1877. He came from a Saxon family, so his native tongue was German. His father was a pharmacist, but Schimert chose another profession. He came to Budapest on his own as a teenager and finished secondary school here, in 1896. From 1898 he studied in various Austrian and German universities (in Berlin, Vienna, Freiburg, Graz, Greifswald, Tübingen) and graduated in Berlin, in 1907. During these years religion played an important role in his life, although he couldn't fully accept neither the teachings nor practices of any established Church. He became a member of various protestant Free Chuches, what's more, he even founded and managed some of them. He started to study homeopathy in Greifswald, in Germany. His teacher was Hugo Schulz, one of the two researchers, whom the Arndt-Schulz law was named after. Schimert would have liked to practise medicine in Budapest as a well-educated physician, therefore he had his university degree validated in Hungary in 1908. He began to learn Hungarian only for this purpose. Schimert was employed as an assistant in Bethesda Hospital from September of 1908. Bethesda was the first homeopathic hospital in Pest, had been founded by the German protestant Church of Pest in 1866. Schimert had an opportunity to meet Bakody Tivadar here who was the head of Bethesda for a long time. He was the most significant homeopath in the late 19 th century Hungary. Schimert regarded Bakody as a particularly gifted homeopath. In Schimert' s opinion the tragedy of Bakody was his solitude in his scientific work, taking too much of his energy to manage all the homeopathic institutions on his own ( university chairs, homeopathic hospitals, society). Schimert managed to raise some physicians' interest in homeopathy. He trained three doctors. One of them was Árpád Schilling who was a surgeon. Schimert and Schilling lived in Budapest from 1909 to 1912. After that Schilling continued practising in Nagyvárad, which in consequence of the Trianon peace-treaty was separated from Hungary in 1920 (now Oradea, Rumania).
