J. Antall szerk.: Medical history in Hungary 1972. Presented to the XXIII. International Congress of the History of Medicine / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 6. (Budapest, 1972)

E. Schultheisz and L. Tardy: The Contacts of the two Dees and Sir Philipp Sidney with the Hungarian Physicians

ioo Medical History in Hungary 1972 (Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 6.) We have complemented their findings with some Hungarian data

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4 in one of our earlier works, therefore, we do not intend to go into details here. The study by Sherwood-Taylor and Josten, referred to above, mentions Bánfihunyadi's activities which were important from the aspect of medical history, several times: "Besides being a professor at Gresham College was interested in or concerned with the technical side of chemistry, manufactures and medicines or materials for such". It is his writings on pharmacochemistry and pharmacology that make Bánfihunyadi's natural scientific work so important for medical science. It is no mere chance that in the manuscript of Jonathan Gođđarđ (1617—1674), treating the materia medica (pharmacology in today's terms), we meet a number of Bánfihunyadi's recipes hitherto unknown by the literature.

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5 However interesting these recipes of Bánfihunyadi may be

—the manuscript mentions their author once as Dr. Huniades, then again as John Hunyades

— it is outside our scope to go into their details. However, we consider it important to mention that the text, or rather the collection of recipes in the manuscript, are so far from being of an alchemist character, that they are not even reminiscent of the "Corpus Alchemisticum"

—which is the basis of all the alchemist writings dealing with gold-making and searching for the phylosophers' stone. The ingredients of the prescriptions, the chemical techniques applied, the methods of preparation all doubtlessly prove that Banfihunyadi must have been a true chemist. It is interesting to notice that as early as in 1641 he already made use of the alcohol-thermometer in certain distilling procedures. The majority of drugs and mineral substances mentioned in the recipes had been used as medicines in the 17th century what is new here is the method of their preparation. All the recipes described in the manuscript were meant for therapeutic use and no trace can be found in them of any "classical" alchemist objective, as the formula of the lapis philosophorum or gold-making. If the work has any connection with alchemy then it is the use of alchemist symbols. By this we do not intend to say that Bánfihunyadi was no alchemist for he was one. It is, however, obvious that his work as a chemist-pharmacologist proceeded in the direction of natural science, it was of an experimental character and clearly distinguishable from alchemy. At the present state of our knowledge, we have a great number of indirect data on his having been an alchemist, whereas we have direct proof of his chemical activities. An excellent Hungarian source

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6 completes our picture of Bánfihunyadi with interesting biographical data. The Hungarian scholar who settled in 4

4 Schultheisz E. — Tardy L.: Bánfihunyadi János az újabb adatok tükrében (J. Bánfihunyadi in the Light of Newer Data). Orvosi Hetilap 1969, pp. 2349-2352. 4

5 Ambix, Vol. 5, p. 50. 4

0 Keserű B. (ed.): Adattár XVII. századi szellemi mozgalmaink történetéhez (Collected Data to the History of Intellectual Trends in the 17th Century). Vol. 2. Budapest—Szeged, 1966, pp. 294-296, 369.