Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 18-19. (Budapest, 2000)
Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts - Guide to the Exhibition
3. Medicine in Hungary in the 16th-17th centuries After the devastating defeat at Mohács in 1526, which was partly due to the overwhelming power of the Ottoman Empire but to internal conflicts as well, Hungary was cut into three parts. One was occupied by the Turks, the sccond remained loyal to the King, who happened to be a Habsburg, and the third one, Transylvania, tried and sometimes were able to preserve independence from both other powers. During the fifteen decades of Turkish rule, there was actually a continual war between these three parts of Hungary. Obviously, in the struggle for survival there was virtually no place left for sciences. Hungarian scholars worked abroad, spreading all over in Europe. The most important representatives of medicine or those of the related subjects were as follows: János Zsámboki (1531-1584) who worked at the imperial court of Vienna. He spoke fourteen languages and was called a giant of erudition (monstrum eruditionis ). We have presented his Emblemata et aliquot nummi etc. published at Leiden in 1590 (No.7); György Heñiseĥ (1549-1585), who was the first to describe the morbus ĥųñgañçųs (typhoid fever), was forced to leave for Brünn (Brno in Bohemia) on account of the jealousy of his colleagues. He is one of those writers who acquired a reputation by analysing the mineral waters of Hungary. He pointed out, moreover, that syphilis can be infectious even without sexual intercourse. János Bánfihunyadi (1576-c. 1650) taught geometry at Gresham College, an institution of the Merccr's Company, in London, but dealt with alchemy too. János Jeszenszky (Jessen¡ųs) (1566-1621) çallçđ himself a Hungarian nobleman though he spent all of his life abroad. Born and educated in Breslau (today Wroclaw in Poland) in a Hungarian family in-exile, he continued his studies in Wittenberg and Padua, where he was graduated in medicine in 1591. He returned to Wittenberg to become a professor of medicine and physician to the Princes of Saxony. It was the Kaiser, Rudolf (reg. 1576-1612, King of Hungary as Rudolf I 1576-1608) who had invited him to Prague to the chair of the professor in medicine at the Charles University, where Jessen¡ųs became appointed rector a few years later in 1617. Jessen¡ųs was the first to perform a public dissection in Prague in 1600. Taking part in the rebellion of the Czech estates (1618-1621) he was captured after the battle at White Mountain (1621) by the Habsburg forccs, found guilty in high treason and was brutally executed. You can sec his important surgical tract the Anweisung zur Wund Arzney (Instructions for Wound Surgery) (No. 9), published in Nürembcrg in 1674, in the show-casc. Moreover, one of the most beautiful medals of our rich numismatic collection, the commemoration medal of Jcsscnius's rectorship (1617), made of silver, is also on display here (No. 10). Ferenc Pápai Páriz (1649-1716) was graduated as a doctor of medicine in Basle in 1664. Returning to Hungary he became mcdical officer in Debrecen but later settled in Nagyenyed (today Aiud in Romania), where he was a professor at 40
