J. Antall szerk.: Medical history in Hungary. Presented to the XXII. International Congress for the History of Medicine / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 4. (Budapest, 1970)
ESSAYS-LECTURES - G. Buzinkay: Sanitary References in Kelemen Mikes's Letters from Turkey (in English)
characterization, "it is a hideous ailment ; in the morning one feels all right, by the evening he is ill, and on the third day he is buried" [30]. As a writer and a man of strong literary interest, it was the behaviour of people that excited Mikes at the time of the plagues. In his own example he showed very well how the state of mind of all of them had altered. "Thank to God, I enjoy good health, but since everybody here speaks of the plague, it has so disturbed our minds that all the time I fancy I am ill, and with these fancies causing fear in the mind, one is incessantly bored and restless . So many times I went to bed with the thought that I should not see the daybreak, not because I felt any change in my health, but because the unrest of the mind had caused such thoughts in me. You shouldn't think that it is only me who feels like this . . ." [31] During their staying there, Ferenc Rákóczi's Confessions [32] report on the first plague in the summer of 1719. Mikes only hints at it. According to his account, the plague of the year of 1722 was the greatest. The exiles were living already in Rodostó then. The town was inhabited by four nations: Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews. (The Hungarians dwelled in some thirty or forty of the most beautiful houses of the Armenian district. [33]) Because of the strict separation and isolation of the four nations, it was very rare that the epidemic had devastated the whole town having 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants [34], still the Hungarians moved outside the town, in tents, to Bujuk álli [35] lying three kilometres from the town. In April, Mikes reported still on the spreading of the plague, but in June he wrote that it took possession of the whole town and it occured that 150 people had died a day. The plague took its tithe of the exiles too —General Antal Esterházy died among others —and it ceased completely in October only. In June, 1726, he again gave news of the plague, then in 1738 from Tschernavoda (its Turkish name is Bogazköy), and finally again from Rodostó in 1751, when for three months (from August to October) it dominated, though in Mikes's words, "it is probable that the plague has no sufficient strength, since many recover from it" [36]. HEALTH PROVISION IN THE EXILE There are questions no less significant from the aspect of medical history, to which only a few references can be found in Mikes's work. One of them is, for instance, that whether there was a permanent physician in Rákóczi's court, and what health provision was like. In his Confessions Rákóczi wrote in 1717, shortly after their arrival in Turkey, that the "kajmakam" (the substitute of the Grand Vizier) had been ill and had recovered by his doctor's help [37]. Since later the expression "I had a vein opened on me" [38] can be found in one of Mikes's letters, and in another he wrote about József, one of Rákóczi's sons, that "he forbade all of us, even his surgeons, to go and see him" [39] we can infer that at least habitually, there was a surgeon to be found among those around. This is confirmed by a Turkish document in which a daily duty of one guru is charged on the French surgeon Baron, who moved to Constantinople, to be paid to András Spatz who from 1739 on took over the duties as a surgeon of the 7* 99
