Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 194-195. (Budapest, 2006)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - SCHULTHEISZ, Emil: Literature on Public Health and State Medicine in Hungary in the Age of Enlightenment

fundamental work written by Frank. Stoll named Huszty the most prominent Hungarian physician active in the theory of medical police, and ranked him in a distinguished position among the European authors specializing in that subject. According to the fully competent opinion of Stoll, Huszty made the new science of medical police "complete'' when he included in his medical police system the discipline elements that Frank had not treated before 1786 as well as those that he left entirely undiscussed. Fluszty examined the social problems of his age on the basis of a medical, and at the same time philosophical approach. He intended to uncover the dominant ideas of the period through profound philosophical analysis, and to connect those ideas with actual social influences and, eventually, with actual diseases and pathological (or at least healthdamaging) phenomena. He went so far in his philosophical examinations that they even included some criticism towards the church and the nobility. That he himself was of noble birth did not stop him from making such critical comments. In reality, these issues were no longer connected to any specialized branches of science, although the healthy scepticism that Huszty felt towards healing methods in general may have originated partly from his critical considerations. Huszty described himself as a deist. His humanist turn of mind, tinted with social concerns, corresponded to that description, but the materialistic approach with which he described brain functions and death itself would have been hard to reconcile with his deism. While he pondered upon the religious and philosophical currents of his age, he expressed surprising opinions on certain issues. He completely rejected metaphysics, even in the sense that Kant had outlined it: "By your leave, Mr. Kant, I must say that pure metaphysics is nonsense. It is like colours for the blind or sounds for the deaf and dumb.

.." The question arises whether Huszty's philosophical considerations, strange as they were in some places, or his attitudes to religion, did anything to materially influence the development of the scientific principles laid down in his Diskurs and the practices that flowed from them. It seems the answer to that question is no. Instead, it was the philosophers of the Enlightenment who influenced Huszty in these respects. His own philosophical expositions were no more than tangential to his actual subject matter, and were intended merely as speculations, rather than theses. Huszty's reflections upon the concept of determinism were aimed at providing theoretical justification to asserting the principle of prevention above ail other considerations. Although Huszty was one of the very first scholars in Europe to study "politia medica" as an independent science in its own right, the theory of medical police received its own university department in Hungary only after such departments were established at several German universities; however, the Hungarian department was launched before the one in Vienna and Prague. A decree issued by the Governor's Council on 22

,u November 1793 ordered the university in Pest to establish a department for forensic medicine (medicina forensis) and another for medical police (politia medica) by the beginning of the following academic year, and to include these subjects among the requirements of the doctorate examination. The first professor of the theory of medical police in Pest was Ferenc Schraud (1761-1806), known especially for his work as a physician specialized in the treatment of epidemics, but equally well-informed in all other areas of medical science, and serving first as a county chief medical officer and then as the chief medical officer of Hungary. Two years after he started to teach this subject, Schraud already put to print a work which was to