Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 18-19. (Budapest, 2000)

The Semmelweis Museum, Library and Archives of Medical History

The Semmelweis Medical Historical Museum, Library and Archives (by Károly Kapronczay) The predecessors The first initiatives for the establishment of a medical historical museum in Hungary were taken in 1905, when the Royal Association of Budapest Physicians invited all doctors and the Hungarian public in general to help with their donations the foundation of such an institute. After a promising start, however, the organization was blocked owing to the recession and financial crisis of Hungary. Though Professor Lajos Nckám tried to renew the plan in 1918, but it was fairly a stillborn idea towards the end of the Great War. The plan for establishing an independent pharmaceutical historical museum first arose in 1919. This plan faccd with similar difficulties as its counterpart and was soon postponed. In the middle of the 1930s a new schedule was launched at the medical faculty of the Pázmány Péter University of Sciences (Budapest). They planned to adhere the museum for medical and pharmaceutical history to the valuable collections of the university institutes, similarly to the organization of the Joseph¡nu/n in Vienna. The majority of these united collections has survived but were never exhibited. The material that had been collected by the Royal Association of Physycians, on the other hand, remained to be stored in poor conditions. In Kolozsvár (since the end of World War I Cluj in Romania) the foundation of a pharmaceutical history museum was more succcssful. In 1887 appeared the first initiatives to collect material rcfering to the past of this profession, and in 1905 Dr Gyula Orient could arrange the opening-ceremony of the first Hungarian Pharmaceutical Museum. Its more than 1500 picccs collection was organized into 8 departments. The first pharmaceutical museum in Budapest was eventually founded in 1948. The material of the József Ernycy Pharmaceutical Museum derived from the collections of the Pharmaceutical Institute and those of the Hungarian National Museum. This institute was closed down in 1963 and its material was transferred to the new national museum on medical history, the Semmelweis Museum. 87