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—D. Karasszon: Victor Babes and the Medical School of Pest (in English)
manian—Hungarian medica connections [10] He came from a Roumanian family in historical Hungary. His father, Vincentiu Babes (1822—1907) was himself a versatile and highly cultured man, born at Hodony in Temes county, educated in Temesvár, Szeged, and Budapest. As a young civil servant he worked in Vienna where he was the editor of the imperial statutes concerning the Roumanians of Hungary. Later he was an officer of the court in Vienna and Budapest, in 1863— 69 he became an assessor of the Royal Court of Appeal in Budapest. Based on his journalistic and legal activities he was three times elected Member of the Hungarian Parliament: in 1861, 1865-75 and 1884 [11]. He was one of the active leaders of the Rumanian national movement in Hungary, and a founder of the Roumanian National Party. Besides his political role in Hungary, he took part in the public life of Roumania as well : as a historian he was elected a member of the Roumanian Academy. ( Aurel Babes became a teacher at the Pharmaceutical Training College in Bucharest after his studies in Budapest and a study-tour in Heidelberg.) The members of the Babes family regarded Budapest and Bucharest equally as their home, although the three sons were born in Vienna, during their father's service there. In the first part of the political career of Vincentiu Babes the spirit of classical Hungarian liberalism was still alive, represented in the party of Government both by Ferenc Deák and József Eötvös [12]. The nationalist course of the official policy of the Government, which ruined the relations with the nationalities for good and greatly contributed to the perpetuation of the conflicts after Kálmán Tisza assumed the premiership in 1875, was alien to them. At the time of the Compromise with Austria it was still Vincentiu Babes who expressed his gratitude in Parliament for the large-minded ecclesiastical policy of the Government, which greatly affected the Roumanian nationality [13]. At the time of the FrancoPrussian war of 1870 he took sides with the opposition, that is with the followers of Kossuth , in support of the French. Opposing the foreign policy of Gyula Andrássy he felt equal concern for the Hungarian and the Roumanian peoples threatened by the imperial ambitions of Germany [14]. Vincentiu Babes is also mentioned by C. A. Macartney , the famous English historian, in his most recent book on the Habsburg Monarchy. Speaking of the resistance of the Roumanians to the Government, he points out that "even among them, opinion was not always uniformly uncompromising. The Roumanians from the Partiųm, whose leaders Vincentiu Babes and Alexandru Mocsonyi, were the most important figures among all their politicians, never quite lost hope of reaching a reasonable accomodation with the Hungarian Government, and even in Transylvania the great Archbishop Saguna preached 'activism' while he lived" [15]. THE PATHOLOGICO-ANATOMICAL; SCHOOL OF SCHEUTHAUER Victor Babes started his career in the 1st Pathologico-Anatomical Institute of the Budapest University. After his studies in Budapest and in Vienna, he became assistant at Gusztáv Scheuthauer, a highly cultured professor of encyclopaedic i86
