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)
Karlovszky and later Gyula Nagy had argued for the establishment of a pharmaceutical museum already in the 1890s. One can read in the Gyógyszerész Közlöny of 1892: "Gyula Nagy, a pharmacist of the capital, is planning the establishment of a pharmaceutical museum. For that purpose he published a notice in the Gyógyszerész Hetilap (Pharmaceutical Weekly), in which he requested the owners of old pharmaceutical vessels to send them to him, adding that he was ready to buy them at fair prices, the money going for the pension-scheme of the pharmacists" [9]. As it has been seen, the idea of a pharmaceutical museum had arisen on several occasions. In an article in 1893 László Traxler presented a pharmacy-bill from 1784 and remarked: ".. . such and similar relics could be finally saved from decay and at the same time kept within reach for everybody, only if a public institute were established for their keeping. If for instance the 'Association of Pharmacists in Ĥuñgarÿ would take matters in its hand, the difficulties would be by no means unsurmountable" [10]. There is still another document I wish to refer to, namely the most important appeal to the pharmacists besides the articles of Orient mentioned above. In 1906 the Gyógyszerészi Hetilap printed the appeal of the presidium of the Hungarian Pharmacist Association [11]. Although its whole text would deserve our knowledge, let us quote here only some lines from it which bear on the relation of private collections having a historic value and public collections. Its wording has universal validity. ".. . the survival of such collections is safeguarded by nothing and the experiences of the past fill us with justified anxiety as for the future fate of these relics. So we must seek guarantees for their preservation. This is demanded by the more narrow interest of our faculty and also by a wider scientific approach, because we have already come to the point where the ruin of any of our relics which could be saved at the same time means a loss for science " [12]. The appeal of the Pharmaceutical Association —similarly to the case of Kolozsvár and the Germanisches Museum of Nuremberg—established the pharmaceutical historical museum as the pharmaceutical collection of the ethnographic department at the National Museum in Budapest, legally as a "permanent deposit". Thus the pharmaceutical historical museum-branch was born in 1906. In the following decades once it was to prosper and once to decline. THE DECADES OF INITIATIVES AND FAILURES Let us mention some initiatives and attempts materialized, which brought the cause of the medical and pharmaceutical historical museum nearer to the real achievements. The plan for establishing an independent pharmaceutical historical museum arose in 1919, too. For the inter-war years in addition to the collections mentioned we must refer to the medical historical museum planned at the medical faculty of the Pázmány Péter University of Sciences [13], which was to be based on the valuable collections of the university institutes. The majority of these collections had survived but never became a real museum. There are 29
