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. 129 with pleasure on the import of smallpox vaccination to England and its spread there, and about the support of the cause of inoculation by Bishop of Worcester J. Maddox. He condemned those who opposed inoculation, refused to submit to it or spoke against it, even if they used the pulpit to do so. Nor did he have any confidence in the effect of the powder of Venetian origin which a surgeon advertised as capable of "overcoming the poison hiding in a body which is unable to put up any resistance

". What the fate of this mystic powder will be, time the best master, will teach us, he wrote. Going a step further in his argument, Weszprémi raised the possibility of active immunization. With his manysided observation of men and animals and sharp judgement he realized that inoculation, until then applied only against smallpox, could be used to combat other contagious diseases; in other words he was striving to derive a general principle from a particular procedure. He observed that the individual contagious diseases took their course independently of each other, one did not neutralize the other, and anyone could get each of them separately whether he had had some contagious disease previously or not. He expressed this in the following way: "The contagious diseases will not tolerate any kind of mingling.

.., the effect of chicken-pox will produce only the poison of chickenpox fouling' up thereby the mass of the blood

; with the consequence of the plague you will not introduce into the body either smallpox or measles, nor any other kind of contagious disease, and in the same way with sanious material discharged by the patient if you attempt to perform an inoculation, you will produce only poison of its own kind

... It is very difficult to determine the substance and quality of this poison, but we know that is a specific poison." (Op. Cit

. pp. 7—8.) He recommended that, similarly to the procedure in the case of smallpox inoculations, the poison of pestilence be introduced artificially into the body at times of epidemics of the plague. He demonstrated that the course of human and animal pestilence is similar. He did not claim to have a reliable explanation why one organism became ill and the other did not, but he supposed that the body absorbs the pathogenic material, and partly retains it and partly re-issues it into the outer world. The pathogenic material causes illness in one person, whereas the organism of the other, like some chemical oven, destroys the alien material. He discovered that the organism has a certain inclination for or against contagious diseases; there is acquired immunity at the cost of having had the illness in question, and there is also natural resistance. Through inoculation, milder "materia morbifica" is introduced into the body, therefore the method is good, and since smallpox inoculation has already been proven, it can also be extended to other contagious diseases. This was his splendid discovery. To quote his own words: "From this system thus outlined it can be best explained what happens in the cases of our epidemic diseases. We would not like to spend time on the explanation of all kinds of trivial things, we yield these to those who deal with such matters. I add here merely what I think is very much my own business

: Nothing is better known then the fact that in the cases of the smallpox and measles there is no longer room for contagion once we have shaken the morbid material from our insides

; thus, if in the future we