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.) January 1918 number of the Természettudományi Közlöny (Natural Science Bulletin). In this article he writes in connection with the war: "Before the war I thought that social morality would prevail much sooner than the time my present hopes would set for its triumph. One of the most terrible results of the two years of world war up to now has been that all the preconditions of social morality have almost completely been annihilated in Hungarian society —or to put it correctly and more candidly , in the agglomeration of people who are still living in the territory of Hungary today ... The war exposed a number of lies and scorned a lot of expectations attached to it. Generally the war has made people much worse, more dissolute, more selfish and more materialistically minded than they before, in the so-called decadent peace. That peace was decadent because already many years prior to the war it was only deceitfully called peace, in fact it was preparation for war, not through the elevation of the souls to make them lofty enough for the great sacrifice of war, but through corrupting people, making them want and demand —or at least accept —war as a business proposition." Then he went on to show that Méhely's doctrine* turned Darwinism topsy turny, and pointed out that the application of the tenet of natural selection to human society and war was false, morally wrong and noxious. Why? "For war is in all respects the very opposite of what we call natural selection and can regard as the main factor in maintaining the soundness of the species. Natural selection picks out the best, preserving them for life and turning them into procreators of the next generation. War also picks the best , the able-bodied, those fit for military service, but casts them a pray to death. .. I will even concede that human development did need some wars in the past. But let everyone open his eyes and he will see that at the present stage of human development, human culture , administration and technical knowledge, war is not a necessity but mere madness. This world war will not bring anything profitable for mankind in general, or for the development of individual nations in particular, but it will cause the destruction of numerous pre-requirements for progress , it will cause the need to create a new from shoddy remnants with long years of work things that would still exist if they only had not been destroyed. It would be absurd to want something at a later stage of development simply because it was needed at an earlier level." "No stride forward can be made in the field of eugenics until mankind is rid of the present war and the spectre of another war." As Apáthy professed that the struggle for survival was no longer inevitable among advanced nations, he held the Darwinist view in regard to the antiprogressive nature of war. This is in fact an important but rarely emphasized aspect of Darwin's teachings. Darwinism has also another equally fundamental and equally infrequently * Lajos Méhely started out as a promising Darwinist, at least that was the impression presented of him by his publication A földi kutyák fajai, származása és rendszertana (The Species, Origin and Classification of Spalax, Budapest 1909) but later he lost his bearings and adopted an openly reactionary and in fact fascist orientation.
