Nemes János: Healing Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
A Look at the Past
secretion of the patients’ infected wounds carried by objects, instruments, possibly air, but most often by hand. It was then that he introduced the chlorine-water handwash. As a result the fever was halted from one moment to the next on Semmelweis’s ward. He thus laid down the basis of asepsis, thus sharing the first place with an American colleague, Holmes, and Lister, an Englishman who had both parallelly come to the same conclusion. But as usual, his discovery was first rewarded with jealousy and spite, not recognition. Another forty years had to pass after his death before his discovery was recognized worldwide and, most important, before his results were to be used in practice. It is an irony of fate that Semmelweis himself died of sepsis, the illness whose cure he had devoted his entire life to. Many public buildings and medical societies bear his name, including the Budapest University of Medicine where he had been professor in the last decade of his life. The Semmelweis-award is the most prestigious medical award in Hungary today. Even a short history such as this cannot exclude a brief look at the work of our highly regarded and popular scientist, Albert Szent-Györgyi, until now the only Nobel prize winning Hungarian medical scientist. He was bom in 1892 in Budapest, and he was not yet forty when as a professor at the Szeged Medical School he first produced vitamin C. He synthesized it from several tons (!) of green peppers, that grow in the fertile area around Szeged. Its effective substance was named ascorbic acid, because of the curing effect vitamin C had on scorbutus. Shortly after that, using a similar method, he extracted vitamin F from lemons. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1937 and became visiting professor at several universities including Harvard and the Sorbonne. He was a brave public figure, a true democrat and an anti-Nazi. In 1948, in protest against the growing influence of the Rákosi dictatorship (similar to that of Stalin) he emigrated to the C1SA where he made several other brilliant discoveries. (Perhaps many remember the Szent-Györgyi-Krebs cycle from their studies.) He died in 1986 in Woods Hole. In 1987 the renowned medical school in Szeged took up his name. 9
