Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 45. (Budapest, 1968)

TANULMÁNYOK - József Antall: Sándor Lumniczer and the Medical School of Pest (Angol nyelvű közl.)

Pozsony, and earned good reputation as a botanist, too with his "Flora Posoniensis", published at Leipzig in 1791. A petechial typhus epidemic carried him off on the 11th of January, 1806 [3—4]. His son, József Lumniczer, inherited his father's affection for nature, but he became an agriculturist, and a considerable member of the economic campaign of the Hungarian Reform Age. He was manager and agricultural adviser of wellknown big landowning families like Esterházy, Batthyány, Nákó, Szvetics, Eitz, and one of the founders of the National Economic Association. Besides his professional knowledge he was greatly interested in literature and the arts. His musical evenings were attended by, among others, Liszt's father, and even by the young Ferenc Liszt. Their friendship survived the years and Sándor Lumniczer made a drawing of the virtuoso of the piano. József Lumniczer himself played the violin, painted, and translated the most beautiful poems of such Hungarian classical poets as Kölcsey, Kisfaludy, Vörösmarty, into German [5]. He found a worthy partner in his wife, Zsuzsanna Schoepf, the sister of Ágost Schoepf Merei, who was one of the greatest figures in the medical history of our country. It is not without reason that we have drawn such a wide background against the noble figure of Sándor Lumniczer, as it would be difficult to understand his extensive interest, his erudition, his balanced human behaviour without all this. These surroundings, these traditions nurtured the Lumniczers, among whom we can find Lumniczer's son-in-law, his great-grandchildren, his engineer brother's son, Sándor, another surgeon and a clay-pigeon shooting champion as well. Going back to Sándor Lumniczer's biography, we may mention that he obtained elementary and lower secondary education privately at Kőszeg, then attended the higher classes of the Grammar School at Sopron and Pozsony. He studied medicine partly in Pest (four years) and partly in Vienna (one year). His graduation as physician and surgeon took place at Pest University in 1844, together with Lajos Markusovszky's, a man six years his elder, who remained his rival and friend in all his life. Ignác Semmelweis graduated in the same year, but in Vienna, where Lumniczer, too, took a degree later in obstetrics [6]. BEGINNING OF A CAREER Strictly speaking the beginnings of his medical and scientific activity were connected whit his studies. As it was customary at that time, he began to work as "honorary assistant" with prof. János Balassa (1814—1868), a status generally granted only to the gifted ones. Balassa was both a master and an artistic surgeon, not inferior to the leading operating surgeons of Europe [7]. After finishing his studies in Pest and Vienna he was appointed to Professor in Surgery at the University of Pest at the age of twenty-nine. He was more than once invited to work at foreign universities, but his aim was to raise Hungarian medical science, medical training, and public health to an European level. His closest