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
i /¡_ 2 Medical History in Hungary 1972 (Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 6.) and broadmindedness, and of the importance of theory and acceptance of evolution among doctors. "It is not enough for the doctor to he an ordinary therapist, the medical profession must not he reduced to a money-making proposition ; if a physician is not an explorer of nature, he should at least he a student of it whom natural scientific training and education place above the layman ... It hardly needs to be verified that philogeny and comparative anatomy also belong among nature studies and are in fact closer to medical interests than some of the other branches of natural science," he writes. Mihalkovics expressed the thesis without which the results of animal experiments could not be applied to man and said : ".. .in proving theses of universal validity ... the development of the closer or more distant animal categories has to be considered. Man is not a being isolated from other living things : his relationship with those is demonstrated by philogeny and comparative anatomy ." The fact that some of Darwin's theses which related to the world of the living in general, were applied to man and especially to human society, led to serious conflicts beyond the field of biology. The aim of these efforts was to make it seem that the grave problems, crises, unemployment and wars colonialization and the exploitation of man conformed to some kind of a natural law. This social Darwinism, which fetishized the Malthusian doctrine, considered the struggle for survival as a fight for existence. The intention behind it was to suggest violent, sanguinary "solutions", and to present natural selection as some device of mysterious powers of a higher order, a device for elevating an "elite" of mankind (the group of the most forceful and violent, the shrewdest and least conscious people) while the masses of workers —described as grey an unintelligent —become mechanical executors of the will of the "supermen", or their soldiers marching into death. István Apáthy, one of the most outstanding scientific and public figures of the first decades of the 20th century, a world-famous researcher on the structure of the nervous system, of the neuro-fibrillae —and at the same time friend and supporter of Mihály Károlyi, one of the leaders of the Hungarian national independence movement —meditated a great deal about the social aspects of Darwinism and did also active research on the subject. Apáthy was born in 1863, became a professor at the University of Kolozsvár, was three times dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, and in 1903—1904 chancellor of the entire university. Without a doubt he was one of the most enthusiastic and most revolutionary personalities of his times, a brilliant man and a man of great spirit. Let us cite a few ideas characteristic of him from his volume entitled A fejlődés törvényei és a társadalom (The Laws of Evolution and Society —Budapest 1922), which contains actually the text of his lecture series delivered in Budapest and Kolozsvár (today Cluj, Rumania) in 1909—1910 at the Free School of the Hungarian Society for Social Sciences. "It is a great mistake to proclaim selfishness as the sole natural motivation of human society and in fact as the only motor of our culture and to deny the power —and so also the use —of social charity and moral sensibility. Neither Darwin
