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
III. 1 Special Education Institute I Occupational centre II schools 332 classes B./ Division of illnesses Type of illness Number of children of school age Number of children attending school deaf and dumb 1,103 738 blind 394 213 imbeciles 2,826 1,308 crippled 518 118 Pető filled a gap in the field of treating disabled people. Patients arrived from all over the country. Not only inpatients, but outpatients as well, both children and adults. Pető had become more and more popular and successful among the patients, but his official acknowledgement or appointment happened only in 1948, before that he was not even paid. The Heine-Medin epidemic Pető was appointed retroactively. One of the main reasons for this was the enormous number of children paralysed by the biannually recurrent Heine-Medin epidemic. The number of paralysed children rose drastically. Conventional medical science failed, which left Pető and his method. The hopeless cases were given to Pető as a kind of experiment. In 1946-47 there was a terrible epidemic of Heine-Medin in Europe. In Denmark all medics were called in to help with the artificial respiration of the paralyzed. In 1957 there was another Heine-Medin wave here as well. This is when the Children's Hospital of Buda got started - where the kindergarten of the Party used to be. All the infected children were brought there. In America during Roosevelt's time, the largest government support was given to those infected with the poliovirus, because the president himself suffered from the illness in his childhood. Later, with the discovery of vaccinations, those kinds of illnesses disappeared almost completely. Instead of them, the Little epidemic was taking its victims. 57 During those times even health statistics were a state secret, and so we can only rely on the figures given in the statistics yearbook for the number of Heine-Medin patients in the years 1948 to 1955. According to doctors, however, the real figures were much higher than the official ones, which might even reflect a deliberate whitewashing. Pető treated motor disabled people with poliomyelitis and other symptoms, especially those who were officially registered as having no chance of improvement. At first to the amazement of the official Hungarian medical circles, and then to their annoyance, he successfully treated and even cured such patients, in almost all cases enabling them to carry on a normal life after his treatment. Interview with Dr. Gábor Palotás, In: Forrai J.: O.e. 119-121.
