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)

V. R. Harkó— T. Vida : British Contacts of I. Weszprémi. 127 And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude ; because thou Woųldes not obey the voice of the Lord thy God." (Verses 21, 22, 27, 62, Chapter 28, Deuteronomy.) Even as late as 1690, the great Hungarian physician Ferenc Páriz Pápai wrote in connection with the plague in his work entitled Pax Corporis (p. 299) that "the reason for this malady lies in.

.. the dreadful judgement of God for sin". He thought that the disease spread through the agency of air: "the pestilence looms in the air", he wrote. The men of science were not content, however, with this pessimistic popular attitude which suggested a good excuse for passivity, but sought for the cause of the disease, its essence and ways to combat it. It was soon discovered that the plague was infectious, and in fact during the big epidemic of 1656 in Italy, the Jesuit monk Athanas Kircher was able to notice with the help of his primitive magnifying lenses innumerable tiny "vermin" in the blood and secretions of corpses infected with the plague, and by his observation and publication of this phenomenon he inspired further experiments. The view that the epidemic spread not through direct contact with the clothing and possessions of the ill gained ground in the early 18th century. This recognition brought with it the introduction of various health measures, such as quarantines and fumigation to prevent the spread of the disease. Used to theological explanations, Hungarian doctors (György Buzinkay, Dávid Sámuel Madai, Dávid Gömöry, and Dániel Perliczi) probably wrote by this time just as a matter of habit that the pestilence visited man as a punishment from God. Then again, after they reviewed the then modern therapeutic and preventive methods, they came out because of sheer habit with the encouragement that in the case of the outbreak of an epidemic everybody was to "trust God, bearing courage and good cheer in fearless hearts". Although the Hungarian physicians were fairly well-versed in foreign medical literature, with the sole exception of Ádám Raymann of Eperjes, who is known to have performed a successful smallpox inoculation in his native town, they knew but little about the methods of prophylaxis connected with variolation and inoculation before Weszprémi's work was published. And yet in England the method of protective inoculation Dr. Emmanuel Timoni introduced in connection with the big smallpox outbreak in 1701 in Constantinople was reviewed already in 1713 in the periodical entitled Philosophical Transactions published by the Royal Society. The method was popularized by Lady Mary Montagu, the wife of - the English envoy to Constantinople in the 1720's. True, between 1726 and 1746 the cause of inoculations was forgotten even in England, and interest in it was reawakened only when J. Maddox, the Bishop of Worcester, founded in 1746 a society for the dissemination of inoculations. In fact a public inoculation house was set up in London, where almost two thousand persons were successfully inoculated, including 300 adults. The poor were inoculated gratis. Gradually even medical practitioners adopted the method of inoculation, and the question was decided largely in favour of the technique by a decision passed in 1754 by the medical association in London, which enjoyed great