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

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2 Medical History in Hungary 19

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2 (Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 6.) In the wake of Darwin, Jendrassik also avoided giving an answer to the question what caused the changes in the organisms which led to the development of new species, and was content to say that: "The offspring organisms in some of their attributes

" may have been different from the parent organism. His failure to do so is easily explained by the limited state of the knowledge of heredity in those days. While Jendrassik was fighting for progressive biological thought in medicine, Lajos Markusovszky (1815—1893) was battling for the same thing in the press. Markusovszky's position in regard to Darwin and Darwinism was clearly reflected in two items in Orvosi Hetilap (1870, pp. 526 and 543). "On July 4th the election of foreign corresponding members took place at the Académie des sciences, namely to fill the posts of the late Lawrence and Carus, of whom the former belonged to the Section of Medical Surgery, and the latter to the Zoological and Anatomical Section. For the Medical Surgery Section Lebert (Breslau) won the majority votes, and after him Kölĥker (

Würzburg

) and Rowmann (London

) barely got any support. In the election for the Zoology and Anatomy Section the votes were very much divided among Brandt, Darwin, Huxley and Loven. In the second round of ballots Brandt was elected on the basis of 22 votes, and thus Darwin, getting 16 votes, flunked out from the French Academy

." The next article expresses unambiguously the position of the progressive Hungarian physician: "We mentioned it among the Miscellany of our preceding issue how it came about that Darwin was not elected when the vacancy left by the late Carus had to be filled. This was, however, not the end of the matter, for the scholarly prejudices which are manifest in that famous institution rose to the point of heated passion, so that those possessed by these feelings not only refused to recognise the optimal merits and excellent thinking ability of the eminent English scholar, but in fact wanted completely to devaluate them. The fact is that through the demise of Purkinje a place was vacated in the Zoological Section and the ruthless struggle is now going on about filling this post. Although Darwin's theory about the evolution of the species is wrong in the opinion of Milne Edwards, he is nonetheless impressed by Darwin's knowledge, and in addition to this he would like to see some moral recognition of his work about the islands formed by madrepores. Elie de Beaumont also holds that the work in question is worthy of reward, although he believes that Darwin has spoiled the good he could have done, by views which are dangerous and wrong at the same time, and according to him Darwin's election should be postponed until he would change his views etc. Apparently the Académie des Sciences had just then entered the phase in which the College of Cardinals had been in Rome when it wanted Galileo Galilei to declare against his conviction that the Earth did not move

..." As a matter of fact Markusovszky expressed his materialistic views sharply enough at other times, too: "However great the anxiety with which the partizans of so-called spiritual culture regard the material orientation of world culture today, matter is only dead if they killed it.

. The Hungarian Society of Natural Science published a Hungarian translation of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation