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)
V. R. Harkó and T. Vida : British Contacts of the Hungarian István Weszprémi, M. D. (1723—1799)
ioo Medical History in Hungary 1972 (Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 6.) FOREIGN JOURNEYS: AUSTRIA, SWITZERLAND, HOLLAND, ENGLAND Weszprémi set out on his study trip in the summer of 1752 when he was 29. As he was a Presbyterian, he did not remain in Vienna, but after a three-month stay there and having met and made friends with Gerhard Van Swieten, he went on to Switzerland. He studied medicine in Zurich, reading chiefly anatomy. It was a significant event of his stay in Switzerland that the faculty of the College at Debrecen, when the city stopped paying them, on an order from Maria Theresa herself, sent him three S.O.S. letters. He handed one of these to Conrad Würz, a minister of the church in Zurich, while, he forwarded the other two, through his academic friend Ferenc Kolmár, to Archbishop Thomas Harring of Canterbury and to the Faculty of Theology in Utrecht. 4 (It is an erroneous belief that Veszprémi himself had at that time direct contact with England. This was before he visited England, while he was staying one and a half years in Switzerland.) The campaign was successful; not only the Presbyterian church in Switzerland and the Netherlands helped with substantial sums, but the Archbishop of Canterbury, some English dioceses and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge made endowments to benefit the College at Debrecen, which was able to subsist on these funds until 1774. The next stop in Weszprémi's journeys was the University of Utrecht, where he received high-level medical training. That was the time when the Boerhaave school was flourishing in Holland. In the spirit of its founder, it applied the newest contemporaneous achievements of the natural sciences and consistently insisted on clinical instruction at the medical faculties of the universities. Weszprémi, as did most of his fellow-students often visited England from Utrecht. During his over four years of "exile" he studied chiefly medicine. His Diary 5 —which was found by Francis Murray, a British historian of literature, at one of the Oxford archives —provides information about Weszprémi's stay abroad and the impressions he gained. The Diary, kept in Latin, with only the last part —written during his stay in England —in English, is a 160-page note-book in a good state of preservation and filled with handwriting. According to D. Lofthouse, an English critic of the Diary, Weszprémi wrote English with grammatical and stylistic precision. This only recently discovered diary must have got mixed up with the books and university notes which Weszprémi presented to the Oxford library before his departure from England. His diary is not only an important source for any biographer, but is also a significant literary work which ranks its author among such outstanding Hungarian representatives of the genre as Miklós Bethlen, Miklós M. Tótfalusi, and Kelemen Mikes. 4 Nagy, Sándor: A debreceni ref. Kollégium. Kerettörténet. (The Presbyterian College of Debrecen. A Flash-Back.) Debrecen, 1940. 5 Lofthouse, David: The Road to Life. Philosophical Transactions, Oxford, 1952, pp. 648 —681.; Sükösd, Mihály: Weszprémi István Naplója (István Weszprémi's Diary). Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények, No. 3, 1956, pp. 322-324.
