J. Antall szerk.: Medical history in Hungary. Presented to the XXII. International Congress for the History of Medicine / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 4. (Budapest, 1970)
MEDICAL HISTORY IN HUNGARY - J. Antall: Museum Affairs Concerning Medical and Pharmaceutical History in Hungary (in English)
physician and a historian, and that experts having archivist, library, and museum experiences should also be brought into the work. They saw it clearly that museum work in medical and pharmaceutical history demanded all kinds of specialists, and it could not be performed by a man having a restricted, traditional line of education [3]. MUSEUM AFFAIRS CONCERNING PHARMACEUTICAL HISTORY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY The birth of a museum in any special field can be brought about by a number of circumstances. The most obvious is to preserve some valuable equipment or collection in a pleasant historic building. So the idea of a pharmaceutical museum was born where there existed the material conditions for that [4]. The first initiative to establish such a museum was made in Transylvania, at Kolozsvár. 4 4The relief society of the students of pharmaceutics at the University of Kolozsvár has decided to set up a Medicine-museum! " [5]. One can follow the history of the Pharmaceutical Museum in the writings of Gyula Orient, a pharmacist, then an assistant at the university of Kolozsvár. They show that it took one and a half decades until the first results could be seen following the enthusiastic start. In 1903 Orient put a notice in the Gyógyszerészi Közlöny (Pharmaceutical Journal) in which he urged for the establishment of a Hungarian Pharmaceutical Museum [6]. So the Pharmaceutical Museum of Kolozsvár collected—and is still holding —material not only from Transylvania, but from the whole territory of historical Hungary. Orient also set an example in rejecting any separatist approach based on narrow-minded trade-chauvinism. He could refer to foreign examples that in most cases pharmaceutical museums were set up within the national museums, as the conditions for an independent museum were missing [7]. In one of his later articles he confesses that his appeal in 1903 in the interests of the Museum at first "was entirely in vain". He achieved some success only through personal visits and correspondence. There were many who rather sent the relics and instruments into the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg than augmenting the pharmaceutical historical collection of the nation. Professor Béla Posta, the director of the Numismatic and Antiquities Collection in the Transylvanian National Museum, wrote in his report on the year 1905: "Let me refer in short to the growth of the pharmaceutical museum which is being formed within our museum . The past of Hungarian pharmaceutics is not shown by any museum . . . Well, it seems to me that in spite of all the difficulties, the Hungarian pharmaceutical museum will become a fact ..." The material of the Hungarian Pharmaceutical Museum was kept in eight groups of collection and it was over one thousand pieces. The respect shown in Transylvania and particularly at Kolozsvár for the past of pharmaceutics resulted in the first pharmaceutical museum of historical Hungary [8]. But the idea of such a museum arose in the rapidly growing metropolis, Budapest, as well. But the individual initiatives all got stuck somewhere. Geyza 28
