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 165 mentioned side. Darwin is known and taught as the pioneer of the theory of evolution, but at the same time the history of science should affirm that Darwinism, beyond its doctrine of the kinship of all living creatures, courageously asserted also the kinship and equality of the human races although at that time but scant paleontological proof was available. The position of progressive Hungarian doctors in this matter is connected with his stand. Apáthy translated the term "eugenics" —to which undesirable connotations had become attached when used in the sense of "race improvement" —as "race health", his own coinage. Probably the terrible human slaughter of the war contributed to making this subject fashionable in Hungary. Méhely was the most reactionary representative of the discipline of eugenics; Apáthy and Lenhossék approached the subject from an entirely different angle. With Apáthy the idea of eugenics lost its barbarous edge. It was already typical of Apáthy's thinking that he championed the use of the term "race health" instead of the German Rassenveredelung. "First of all , because health is a more objective concept than nobility which is always affected by the subjective interests of the person making the value judgement , and second because the topic on which eugenics may in fact provide some scientific guidance is in fact the health of the race," he reasoned. For him "race" signified the whole human race. In a large part of his study Apáthy writes —chiefly on the basis of Dr. Géza Hoffmann's book Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerica, Munich 1913—on how this question is treated in the United States, where, although just a few initial steps were taken, still more was done in the field than anywhere else in Europe. Not —says Apáthy—because the social spirit is there stronger than in the more educated countries of Europe, in fact there the exaggerations of the individualistic world outlook are in certain direction even more extreme. He notes that the progress made in the United States in the matter of race health is by no means owing to American constitutionalism or democracy, and in fact remarks, "Unfortunately not even a socialist approach has a big share in this." Dealing with the position of Negroes in the United States, Apáthy denies that the prevention of marriages between whites and coloured is simply a consequence of the natural disgust with which the Anglosaxon tribe regards sexual union with the inferior blacks. "This disgust is hardly evidenced by the still growing number of Mulattos and even less by the fact that in the States of the South it was the general custom in the period of slavery to keep Negro concubines and this custom still exists. Of course, formerly it was in the interest of people to increase the number of slaves, today it is hardly profitable to procreate coloured people because today already even the coloured demand rights and a share in the national possessions." Mihály Lenhossék (1803 — 1937), an outstanding exponent of the neuron hypothesis, a morphologist of world-wide renown, was Apáthy's contemporary. A writing by Lenhossék which appeared three months after Apáthy's article, in the April 1918 number of the same Bulletin under the title "The Races
