Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 200-201. (Budapest, 2007)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - FORRAI, Judit: History of a Special Healing Method for Motor-disordered Children: Conductive Education - A mozgásszervi betegségben szenvedő gyermekek egyik sajátos gyógymódja, a konduktív nevelés története

Pető's origins When drawing a picture of András Pető's life story, we can rely on only a very few sources: his own autobiographical writings'

7 and those of Mária Hári,

18 and the interviews with the people who remembered him. He was born in Szombathely in 1893 as the eldest child of a lower middle-class family. His father ran a little grocery shop and was the postmaster; his mother was a teacher. According to hearsay, his father was motor disabled

19

. He was a talented student. His parents lived poorly, so he paid for his education through giving private lessons. "Part of my salary I sent home to my parents who had to take care of my two much younger brothers, "- he writes. He first went to schools in Szombathely, then finished grammar school in 1911 in Budapest. He was talented in writing and got a job at the newspaper Pester Lloyd

20 His articles caught the attention of the publisher and he was sent to Vienna with a stipend to study liberal arts. He chose medicine, however. We have no information about the reason for this decision, since in his biography he simply states that he earned a medical degree in Vienna (July 26. 1921). At the beginning of the 20

1 century the exciting and teeming intellectual atmosphere of Vienna, which was considered to be the capital of sciences and the arts deeply impressed the young Pető. He became part of a circle of young people representing the intellectual elite, and who held discussions lasting late into the night. Vienna was the citadel of the fin de siècle thinking, that of sciences and arts, it was a meeting place of the European intellectual and home to professional workshops. It was called the capital of modernism, the field laboratory of the end of the world, the flower of dissolution, or simply: "requiem and birth." The youngest empire of Europe was living out its last broken decades and it gave space to new ideas. Musil captures the spirit of the times exactly when he says: "out of the oil-smooth spirit of Europe suddenly wing-giving fever flamed up, and no one could tell ifit was going to be a new art-moral or a regrouping, but everyone wanted to fight against what was old. Practical and intellectual desires to do either met or were different to the extremities. ... The admiration of the higher human being was fashionable, just as much as that of the lower, health and sunshine were loved, but frailty as well, people were believers and sceptics, they dreamt of royal parks and of prairies, of social equality and of the destruction of the old order."

21 In the changing political and economical world both banker and entrepreneur were equally present. The seed of the bourgeois intellectual, people of sciences and arts were mainly assimilated emigrants, Slavs and Jews, and to a lesser degree Hungarians and ItalAutobiography of András Petö, in a glass display cabinet at the International Pető Institute lx Dr. Mária Hári: (1923-2001) Pető's closest colleague, the Director of the International Pető Institute after Pető's death. 19 Interview with Péter Popper, In: Forrai J.: Memoirs of the beginnigs of conductive pedagogy and András Pető Budapest-Birmingham, Új Aranyhíd - Foundation of Conductive Education, 1999. 103-109. 20 The Pester Lloyd (1854-1944) was a daily newspaper of Budapest in German language reporting on Hungarian social life. It reappeared in 1989. 21 Robert Musil (1880-1942) Austrian writer. The Man without qualities. Vol. 1 chapter 15.