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 - J. Antall: Absolutism and Liberalism in Health Policy in Hungary (in English)
category of "applied politics", which was formulated mainly by the experts and leading intellectuals gathering around them. Eötvös was famous for his ability to collect a "brains trust" around himself. He had all the qualities for that: his intellectual superiority, his tactfullness, and an ability to respect other people's opinions. He knew that the prerequisite of all planning and execution was the selection of the right experts and leaders. The leading brains of the intelligentia—the "eggheads" of that age, though that shape was not characteristic of them—were all gathering around him from the end of the 184os onwards, and it was even increasing in the 'fifties and the 'sixties. THE CENTRALIST PROGRAM AND THE MEDICAL SCHOOL OF PEST The fortunate interaction, the alignment of the general program and the plans concerning public health and medical training took place in these years, from the end of the reform period to the Compromise. It is easy to recognize the close relationship of ideas between the political circle of Eötvös and the medical circle of Balassa. They met in their efforts aiming at the creation of the bourgeois state endowed with constitutional and democratic liberties as well as in accepting the compromises made after the lost war of independence, and in the fight for the improvement of sanitary and cultural conditions. They equally detested the distortion of scientific research, coming from any direction, even if "under the banner of patriotism". And they were also agreed that the understanding with Austria must be maintained not through the person of the sovereign, but through the Austrian liberals and the reformists of Vienna, by keeping in contact with them. The approach of Balassa, Markusovszky, Lumniczer and Frigyes Korányi to general policy and cultural policy was akin to that of Eötvös, and in turn they provided the centralists with the missing health program. Social politics based on prevention could easily meet the program of physicians who proclaimed prevention in sanitation. The latter was manifested in the teachings of Semmelweis as well as in the doctoral dissertation of Markusovszky (The physician as educationalist, Pest, 1844), which argued for prevention as the basis of health policy. The group of the centralists and the medical school of Pest were the fruits of the same age, the same social-political school, expressed its general polities and their application. It was not by accident that in 1848 János Balassa, and after 1867 Lajos Markusovszky was put in charge of the university affairs by Eötvös . The meeting and interrelation of the planning activities of the centralists and the efforts of the medical school of Pest created the cultural-scientific and health organization of modern Hungary, and laid down the foundations of her institutions. The Minister of Public Education, Ágoston Trefort (1872—1888), declared that uone of the main conditions for the development of our economy is public health " [15]. His triple slogan: "public health, economy, public education ", clearly shows the recognition of their interdependence. He understood that public 153
