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 - G. Buzinkay: Sanitary References in Kelemen Mikes's Letters from Turkey (in English)
At times it occurs that he tells in detail of their last days. That is why his letters referring to Miklós Bercsényi are interesting [15], and especially plastic is the description of his last hours [10]. "The water having flowed out of his legs , they began to rot away"—he wrote. "One is moved to pity atseing how the rotten flesh is being cut off his legs. And when we hear him shout and wail in his great pain, it seems as if I saw the martyrs of old times in their torments " [17]. Of his own illness he spoke three times in all. Among them, twice he described malarial fever [18] the "manner of treatment" of which is particularly interesting. "Auntie , do you know how I cured myself?" —he wrote proudly in his letter. "With an expensive Transylvanian medicine. Everybody was laughing at it, the prince most of all, when I told them about it. And that expensive medicine is cabbage soup, and if it is effective, why should I go and look for expensive Indian medicines ? [19]. All the same, Cabbage had an honoured role with him, already in his letter No 56 he almost wrote a veritable hymn to cabbage. The origin of this cult can be looked for partly in Transylvania, where "in the old times no other meal was regarded more becoming to the Hungarian stomach than cabbage [20]. On the other hand, Noel ChomeVs economic dictionary bears witness that it was a widely used medicine in contemporary France, moreover—judging from Pliny's letters—it had already been used in Rome too [21]. When he got older, he suffered from disease of the eye, probably from haemorrhage. In the course of more than one year he returned to this subject in every letter of his [22]. First he began by seeing weaker and weaker, as if on his eyes "some thinfilm had been placed" [23], then, for about a year and a half, he went completely blind. Finally he regained his eyesight "without any remedy ". "At the beginning of this month I began to see a bit better. A couple of days before that, I began to feel in my eyes as if something had got into them, for something was pricking them for two or three days—although I know that nothing had got into my eyes : I asked the others to have a look at it and they couldn't see anything. It has just occurred to me that those thinfilms that had been before my eyes might want to fall down. And so it was, because after the third day I didn't feel that heavy pricking any more and could see much more clearly. In one word, by the grace of God, I could put the prayer-book to use today, on my name-day, that I could not do for a year and a half" [24]. These descriptions of diseases are significant data to the biographies of the members of Rákóczi's exile. Although from the aspect of medical history they are not very precise, they are plastic and interesting descriptions. PELOTHERAPY AND EPIDEMICS More spacious than those above, and primarily, more spicy are the descriptions of bathings. With a few comments on contemporary bathing life, a more general social panorama emerges from the letters. It is worth quoting Mikes on the experiences of their first bathing and drinking cure. The description is witty and realistic; Mikes depicts a characteristic scene, and presents some data to Turkish culture history, of which the history of natural bathing—besides the 7 Orvostörténeti Közlemények 97
