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
E. Réti: Darwin's Influence on Hungarian Medical Thought 163 nor those followers who understood him ever offended in this way. It is not Darwinism to pretend that murder may promote development . It is nonsense to call social Darwinism a tenet according to which collective killing —war —is the mother of human progress." He treats the evolution of the species and the development of new species as alternatives. **l think it is probable that the original kinds of initial cells for the evolution of species were much more numerous than the number of living species we know today. Certainly a great many of the genealogical lines from the initial cells of development were interrupted, and, in comparison to the original infinite varietys perhaps only a small number of lines continued the present generation, coming, down to the species still existing today. True, as I said, distinct species still existing today could have come into being through a later ramification of a lineage which started as a common one", he writes. Apáthy considered mutation a mechanism by which a variation could be effected in the development of the species. "Why could not some of these higher degrees of differentiation which persist, the so-called mutations, be simply taken for a larger step than usual in the way of the further development of the species ? he asked." "Perhaps later —more slowly and more gradually —several individuals of the species will go through the same transformation. We are dealing merely with the further development of the species and not the genesis of new species. .." While Lajos Méhely, that apostle of "race protection", that is, racism (his version of eugenics), tried to justify the horrors of war by the struggle for survival and by natural selection, and made war seem not merely inevitable but even beneficent, Apáthy stood on the side of humanism. Méhely wrote, for instance in 1915 in the Természettudományi Közlöny (Natural Science Bulletin), championing a reactionary social Darwinist and practically fascist ideology: "The world war now taking place also bears the marks of the eternal laws of nature. .. and is inevitable. .. Those who comprehend the laws of biology are aware of the fact that the terrible world war now taking place is merely a phenomenon of the struggle for survival, a manifestation of unusual form and shocking in its dimensions." Méhely regarded "German overpopulation" and secondly "the overpopulation of Russia" as the causes of war, entirely on the basis of the Malthusian theory. Moreover: "The direction of progress always serves development according to species and races, and the laws of adaption and heredity make it entirely impossible that at any future time a mankind homogenous in body and spirit should populate the Earth. We have in truth been saved from on a national scale. War is a cleansing fire." He tried to explain this nonsence as follows: "True, in war a great many men of noble character and heroic spirit fall in battle, and at the same time many defective people are spared death, something that apparently repudiates the principle of natural selection, but let us not forget that the selection in not among the individuals, but among peoples and nations, and the result is assured by the collective total." As against this decadent ideology, Apáthy took a very progressive stand in his article "The Scope and Tasks of Eugenics", which appeared in the 11*
