Schultheisz Emil: Traditio Renovata. Tanulmányok a középkor és a reneszánsz orvostudományáról / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 21. (Budapest, 1997)

24. Short history of epidemics in Hungary until the Great Cholera Epidemic of 1831

Z^oo¡ at the end of August 1485 among the soldiers of Henry VII Earl of Richmond

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. It is therefore very interesting and characteristic for the very rapid spreading of the epidemic, that is appeared already in the autumn of that very year in the centre of the continent, in Hungary too

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2. This epidemic had five major waves (1485—86, 15Ö7, 1518, 1529, 1551), all of them reached Hungary, but without catastrophic results

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3. 1494: this is the year when syphilis appeared first in Hungary. This disease appeared at first in an acute infectious form and spread epidemically, it had at the time not exclusively the character of a venereal disease. The king retired to his hunting grounds situated in a distant part of the country, spent all the summer there and only returned to his residence, when the epidemic was already subsiding. We know from the Italian Physician Montagnana that the archbishop of Esztergom, Thomas Bakács, was also infected, but he did not fall victim to the disease, while many people died from its consequences

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4. A new epidemic of plague raged all over Europe in 1495; Gáspár Heltai and Miklós Istvánffy, both contemporary historians, left staggering reports of its course

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5. While the plague had not abated even in 1496, syphilis was spreading along the Danube. The Hungarian army of crusaders took part not only in spreading the plague, syphilis and disentery, but also in bringing leprosy to Transsylvania. Many cases of leprosy occurred in 1496 in Brassó, the economic centre of Transsylvania, through which the major part of trade with the Balkans passed, and the town was forced to build at high cost a leprosy hospital. The country-wide character of the 1510 epidemic of the plague is shown by the fact, that king Wladislaw II fled from his capital Buda first to the town Pozsony, then to Moravia and entrusted the palatine with the government of the country. The plague was again followed by a great famine. In an important town of Transsylvania, Nagyszeben, the physician J. Salzmann had a strong quarantine introduced and as a result the country-wide plague, which had been very violent in Transsylvania too, spared the town

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6. According to some sources the morbus ĥųñgañçųs ravaged badly in 1529 in the army of sultan Soñrnañ during the siege of Vienna. The rather few descriptions we have make it more probable that it was enteric fever which raged in the ranks of the Turkish army

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7. From the middle of the XVIth century on much more records were left to us as a result of the development of the culture of writing in Hungary. We present in a short, summarizing chronological table, restricted to the most important data only, the epidemics in Hungary to deal after this introduction with the valuation of the most important effects. Only few records referring to entire parts of the country have survived; the chronicles of towns, notes of ecclesiastic and secular persons refer only to narrow areas, to their own territory. By comparison of these records we have established the more important years of epidemics. 1

1 Shaw, M. B.: A Short History of the Sweating Sickness. Ann. Med. Hist. 1935, Vol. V., 246. 1

2 Petĥő, G. op. cit. 223. 1

3 Uvento, A.: Storia de le grandi malattie epidemiche etc. Roma, 1938, 564. 1

4 Cfr. Luisinus, Aphrodis. Coll. venet. secunda. II. 6. 976. 1

5 Heltai, G.

: Chronica. Claudiopoli, 1575. — Nicolai Istvánfi Pannonii Historiarum de Rebus Ungaricis etc.

, Coloniae Agrippinae, 1622. 1

6 Linzbauer, X. F.: Cod. san.-med. Hungáriáé. Tom. I., 142—174. 1

7 Ilvento op. cit. 563.