Nemes János: Healing Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
A Look at the Past
European standard. Tamás Jordán (1539-1585), army chaplain at Komárom was the first to describe the fever then called morbus hungaricus, that is Hungarian Fever, better known today as petechial typhus or spotted fever. Although the first doctors training school was founded in 1465 on the initiative of János Vitéz, it was not until 1635 that Péter Pázmány, archbishop of Esztergom, famous writer and public figure of the time founded the first university in Nagyszombat, which first moved to Buda in 1771, then later to Pest. The 19th century saw the thriving of natural sciences. János Balassa (1814-1868), famous professor of surgery at the time was the first to perform an operation using anaesthetic, only a year after Morton, the English medical scientist, had discovered ether. (A hospital in the capital named after Balassa commemorates this event.) It was around that time that Endre Hőgyes (1847-1896) founded the second scientific institute in the world after the Pasteur Institute in Paris, manufacturing and developing vaccines. The street the Institute was located in today bears the name of its founder. This was also the time when Ignác Semmelweis (1816-1865) earned an international reputation of saviour of mothers. Few people know that the genius, who defeated puerperal fever, was a Hungarian. This dreadful fever was still killing every fourth woman even in the mid-19th century. Like every invention, this one was also ingeniously simple. In those days, it was doctors themselves like Semmelweis and his colleagues at the first maternity ward of the public hospital in Vienna who carried out dissections. They hurried to attend their patients straight from the dissecting room without washing their hands. Thus they themselves infected the women in labour. The pathogen was not yet known but the link was discovered by Semmelweis after a tragic incident. Jacob K. Kolletschka, Semmelweis’s tutor in forensic medicine died of blood poisoning after wounding himself during a dissection. Having read the report of his post-mortem examination Semmelweis wrote: “...K.’s death was a revelation. 1 suddenly saw the link with the fever which had caused the death of so many women giving birth...” He discovered that puerperal fever was caused by the 8
