Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 55-56. (Budapest, 1970)

Előszó (Szabó Zoltán)

And if I still succeeded to prevent its outbreak, then it is an evidence of the fact : not the cosmic, athmospheric, telluric influences give rise to this illness, but rather an eliminable reason and this is a putrid animal organic material," His discovery : the revealation of the cause of the puerperal fever and the effective practice of prevention opened a new epoch in the gynaecology. At the same time it is an epoch-making step forward, getting out of the descriptive morphology to a new aetiological period of medicine ; as a source of the new way of thinking refuses to believe, even declaims the views existed about the mystic and meant unimpressionable pathogenic causes. The conclusive criterion of the justice, greatness and importance of his discovery and its practice of nearly hundred years are the raising powers, which put him among the great epoch-making personalities of the human medicine. The Hungarian physicians are looking up to Semmelweis with grateful respect, they are keeping and cultivating his memory and are remembering him even to-day, in these solemn hours. Our respect and piety wouldn't be really worthy of him, if we preserved his personality only in our remambrance and we would express our gratitude towards him only by commemoration in change for his discovery and life-work. We have to do something for him !His life-work is our inheritance, but it is also his human-medical personality, his life and work, his example. Our inheritance is his exemplary life, his research-work for the new in the favour of the development of science and society, his passion of perception and recognition, his objectiv, logic method applied in the revealation of facts, his Strict, uncompromising courage in his fights for the sake of mankind and science; these makings of him were able to break through the bounds of —often personal and selfish—misunderstanding. Semmelweis lived in such an age, in which reactive, retrograde social system and its opressive state power ruled over our country. The barriers of the contemporarian medical thinking and knowledge, the selfish, retrograde individual interests and passions hindered his discovery to get into practice as a generally known and acknowledged theory. Our people is working for the full setting up of the socialist society, for the realization of the socialist public health. We are living in a socialist country which represents the necessary, inevitable realization of the historic development of human society and it is conscious realisator of it too. Its substance and aim is the creation of progress in our social, economic, scientific and cultural life. We have to accept the substance of Semmelweis' human and medical genius ; to act in its favour is our inheritance and our duty to guard unbroken his memory. It is given only to few in the course of centuries, generations that the results of their talent and life-work raise them in the line of great historic personalities, into the Pantheon. We can do our best : nameless, as the man of everyday life to serve the progress and prosperity of our people, of mankind to work for their happiness, to be able to form the history and medicine at the same time. Zoltán Szabó Festal speach of Zoltán Szabó, Minister of Health at the opening session of the Semmelweis Anniversary Week on november 10th, 1968.