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)
I. Friedrich: The Spreading of Jenner's Vaccination in Hungary
DARWIN'S INFLUENCE ON HUNGARIAN MEDICAL THOUGHT by ENDRE RÉTI <T<he first tidings of Darwin's tenets in Hungary did not come from a physician; in this country a schoolmaster published the first article on the Darwinist theory of development. The article by Ferenc Jánosi (1819 — 1879) entitled "A New Theory of Natural History. The Origin of the Species" was published in Budapesti Szemle (p. 383) in 1800, a few months after the appearance of the original paper by Darwin. Jánosi taught school at Marosvásárhely, and in the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848 — 49 he manufactured gunpowder together with Ferenc Mentovich to help beat the Habsburgs. His inclination for the natural sciences and his familiarity with chemistry and medicine made him interested in the Darwinian teachings. "Few scientific works aroused such lively attention ", wrote Jánosi, "as the one whose title may be found as a heading to these lines . The noisy attacks against it and the equally resounding appreciation evidence that this is the work of a genius , a work whose mission is to inspire, to change the every-day course of ideas and thinking ." After Jánosi, an article by Jácint János Rónai was the next to explain the meaning of Darwinism to Hungarian readers. Rónai was doctor of philosophy, he participated in the War of Independence as a minuteman and chaplain, and after its defeat he worked as a pharmacist's assistant at Nádudvar, but had to flee to escape arrest, and in 1858 he emigrated to England. He had, however, an offer from Ferenc Császár, the editor Pesti Napló, to write three letters a week to his paper. That was how Rónai became a correspondent and from 1862 on he started to write reviews for the Hungarian press on Darwin's book and on Darwinism. In 1863 he published an article on Thomas H. Huxley's work Man's Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays, and from Sir Charles Lyell The Biological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. As a result of the great interest stirred up by the article, he published his studies on the subject a year later, and then four years later in a second edition, entitling the volume "Origin of Species. The Place and Age of Man in Nature". The initial reports of Darwinism soon stimulated the first anti-Darwinist responses, too. Professor Sámuel Brassai of the University of Kolozsvár, (today Cluj, Rumania), represented the rise of the anti-Darwinist trend. He wrote in 1863 in the following vein: "Darwin takes natural selection for the basis of his theory
