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)
THE DEPARTURE OF BABES TO THE UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST In 1889 Babes was invited to the University of Bucharest, and in 1899 was there given a generously equipped institute where he was to work for nearly thirty years. The number of his scientific writing and tracts exceeds the thousand. But their appreciation cannot be our task here. When we described the family background we have seen the whole picture. Babes , as an outstanding member of the Rumanian intelligentia of Hungary, received a mostly Hungarian education, and received the scholarship of the Hungarian state. But as a Rumanian he obviously considered Rumania, too, as his country, and always proclaimed himself to be a Rumanian. This was naturally received with aversion by the nationalist upsurge of the 1880s, but those who fail to see the large-mindedness and progressive approach of the leading figures of Hungarian public and scientific life, its whole trend, are equally biased. Being aware of the Rumanian nationality of Babes, Eötvös and Trefort made no exception in supporting his talent. And the circle of Balassa, the masters of the medical school of Pest, took even less notice of it, as they rejected everything which did not confirm with their belief in scientific truth [29]. The living representatives of the school—of which Babes, too, was unquestionably a memberdid not even allow the fact of his departure to create a hostile atmosphere. It might be worth while quoting one of the 1887 issues of the Hungarian Orvosi Hetilap: "We regret his departure from our university, but we should not take offence at his not declining an offer, which opened up such possibilities for his work and was at the same time financially advantageous . We regret the departure of Professor Babes because he was a man of great learning , very studious, and our most active specialist in the field of bacteriology for the time being ... Otherwise it is to be welcomed that the former student of the Budapest university was honoured by such an important mission, and we shall be only too pleased if his hopes concerning his work and its results will come true and he will succeed by his researches though for some time in a foreign country, to add something to medical science for our common good " [30] (Fig. 2.). His relations to Hungary became somewhat strained when in 1899 Aladár Aujeszky, a young assitant of the General Pathological and Therapeutical Institute in Budapest (directed by Endre Högÿes) refuted the results of one of the experiments of Babes and his conclusions drawn [31]. A rather heated dispute [32] took place on the columns of the Centralblatt für Bakteriologie [33]. Aujeszky gave an account of it in his book written in 1912 [34]: " The experiences of Wassermann and Takaki, namely that by injecting an emulsion of the spinal cord of a healthy guinea pig, the albino mouse will be protected even against a three to five times lethal dose of tetanus toxin, led Babes to attempt whether by repeatedly injecting normal nerve-substanse into experimental animals subcutaneously they can be immunized against rabies . In that respect Babes had very favourable results, which, however, were not confirmed by the control experiments of Calabrese or the present writer. In my experience by injecting normal nervesubstance into experimental animals (dogs, rabbits ) throughout a longer period in 191
