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 1972 (Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 6.) and Eugenics" suggests an interesting comparison. This study spotlights essentially the same problems that are stressed in Apáthy's article: "The question of the equality or unequality of the races", to which a critique of the slogan of the "superior German race" is added. Lenhossék defined the concept of human race in Darwinist terms. He established that in comparison to the animal kingdom the human species are unified as a whole, but within this entity there is a colourful mosaic of races, or breeds of men. The race is a group of human beings characterized by constitutional and psychological similarities inherited from generation to generation. Lenhossék cautioned that race should not be mixed up with "people" or "nation" whose characteristic distinguishing features did not derive from nature but developed historically from human psychology. József Madzsar, (1876 — 1938) an outstanding member of the Hungarian socialist intelligentsia, a great physician and courageous politician, invited support for Darwinism both in his books and lectures. Moreover his views, although some of them were stated over 50 years ago, can still be considered relevant and progressive. Madzsar loved people and was passionately interested in social progress. Consequently he came into close contact with politics already as a student. His political interests were intertwined with a philosophical and analytical bent; he liked to delve in the fundamental epistemological problems of natural science, the discussion and propagation of these problems. He translated a great deal, he interpreted most of Darwin's work to Hungarian readers, and he made available Kropotkin and Bölsche, the well-known and internationally significant nature philosophers of the times. In Hungary he was one of the Marxist pioneers of Darwinist thinking, a broadminded investigator of natural and social development. This is evidenced by the lectures he held at the Society of Natural Sciences and the radical Galilei Circle. His principal works are: "The Origin of Man", "Human and Animal Societies", and the essay "Lamarck and Darwin" which appeared in the brochure on the operation of the Free School of Social Sciences in 1908—9. Most of them are stiil regarded as exemplary in their natural acientific approach, in the clarity of their analysis and conclusions. Let us quote from his The Origin of Man and the Outlines of Phylogenetics, which appeared in 1918. After Heraclitus's motto, "/ see nothing hut change. Do not let yourself be deceived I Your shortsightedness and not the nature of things makes you think that you see a substantial island in the sea of change"

, has given the keynote, Madzsar begins his book in the following vein: "The proud world outlook of Man created in the image and likeness of God was twice humiliated by science. First by Copernicus when he removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and classified it with the satellites among which it orbits the Sun. Second by Darwin, who deprived man of the special position he had occupied in the realm of the living and ranked him with the beasts. In living nature there is no striving for any goal. If the living creatures take on increasingly complex structure as the earth is developing and are making complex adaptations, then without a doubt some regulating fundamental principle must