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. JR. Harkó—T. Vida

: British Contacts of I. Weszprémi. 137 as 1717. He made no mention of this fact in his Diary. He was probably introduced to the movement by van Swieten, one of the leading figures of Freemasonry in Vienna. His correspondence indicates such contacts from 1760 on: "Vale et res tuas feliciter age et ego te semper amabo.

.." We know that Freemasonry was popular in the 1770 to 1780's in the intellectual circles of Debrecen and in Weszprémi's environment, too, for his house was an intellectual centre visited by such outstanding figures of Hungarian cultural history as János Földi, who became his son in law; Mihály Fazekas, Mihály Csokonai and Ferenc Kazinczy, the poets. With Weszprémi's death one of the great Hungarian personalities of the 18th century departed. He left his memory to posterity only in his works, for both his portrait and tomb are unknown. Although he was a scholarly physician well-known and admired both at home and abroad even during his lifetime, and the information he collected served as a basis for further work along the same lines, and although beginning with the second half of the 19th century the positivist trend of philosophy, having corrected his smaller errors and contributing new data to his research, preserved his lifework for the 20th century, nonetheless Weszprémi received the appreciation he would have deserved already in his life only in the present century. Even though Maria Theresa decorated him, a foreign scientific society elected him into its membership, though he was a distinguished citizen of Debrecen and his name had a familiar ring for doctors abroad as well as in Hungary, the political and social conditions of the times did not make it possible that his talent and knowledge become more widely known. Although a medical faculty existed at the University of Nagyszombat from 1769 on, as this was an institution endowed by the Catholic Church it could not offer a professorship to the Protestant Weszprémi. From his homeland he received genuine recognition only in the present century. In 1939 the valuable, then 60,000-volume library of the Medical Faculty of the University of Budapest was named after him. In this century such Hungarian medical historians as Tibor Győry, Gyula MagyaryKossá, György Elekes, and András Dadaÿ have made his life and activities a subject of research, and regularly publish their results. The Medical and Pharmaceutical Historians' Professional Group, the antacedent to the Hungarian Society for Medical History, founded the István Weszprémi Memorial Medal in 1958. It is distributed annually among the medical historians who have made outstanding contributions, marks an important step in giving Weszprémi his due. The medal is of metal, 7.5 cm in diameter, and the observe bears the legend: "In memóriám Stephan Weszprémi Societas Medico Pharmaceutic Históriça MCMLV

III" and the reverse has on it an inscription which reads "Pro mer ids in scrutanda Históriça Mediça

" with the addition of the name of the person to whom the award of the medal is to be made. The Semmelweis Museum of Medical History and its Library undertook the project of translating and publishing Weszprémi's Succinta, a rare print