Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 66-68. (Budapest, 1973)

TANULMÁNYOK - Bugyi Balázs: Az iparegészségügy kezdetei Magyarországon (1928-ig) (angol nyelven)

career), i.e. a good deal before an appliance of its like had been first installed in the surgical departments of the Budapest clinics. Acting on the panel as radiologist was Mihály Karácsonyi who was going to die from ray injury and is honoured today as a victim of science. A column also with his name for the memory of the X-ray workers in medicine in the park of St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg. According to an extant list of items, the X-ray laboratory comprised a Teltschow lighter, a Ruhmkorff apparatus with 30 cm spark-gap for X-ray exposures, complete with electric storage batteries and with cryptoscope. A staff of professional first-aid assistants with medium-grade qualifications performed non-stop service beside the factory surgeon's office. Hungary's industrial tycoons refused to accept the functions of welfare relief funds from after 1900 as a social requirement, because —as they maintained — "all these provisions are purely on a charity basis which has nothing to do with the concept of industrial production. The employer is providing opportunity for the worker to earn his living and has legitimate claim in return to disciplined and unconditional labour". Neither the State Council of Public Health nor any other high-level sanitary and social body of Hungary raised protest against this attitude of the Hungarian Organization of Industrialists or did anything to save the workers from abuse. The records kept by the Workers District Insurance Organization in their medical consulting offices furnish particulars about the occupational disease and works accident statistics of Budapest workers. Vilmos Friedrich, favoured disciple and for a while private assistant of Hungary's Grand Master of internal medicine Sándor Korányi, set up reports at regular intervals of time about the cases of occupational diseases, diagnosed and treated in the Organization's Policlinics. On the ground of this basic work he was qualified in 1900 as lecturer (privat docent, associate professor) on the subject described as "Pathology and Therapeutics of Industrial Diseases"; in 1901 he was promoted to lecturer of "Industrial Hygiene" at the Technical University of Budapest and was honoured in 1922 by the title to extraordinary nominal university professor. Most problematic to deal with, right from the start, among all the patients admitted to the policlinics of the Workers District Insurance Organization, were the cases of mandibular necrosis, due to the effect of yellow phosphorus used in match-making. Friedrich, who prepared a survey of the cases that had been treated at the policlinics in 1900, succeeded to move the board of the Insurance Organization to issue a set of rules to prevent the disease, and to submit a formal petition to the Government, Ministery for Industry and Trade, for banning the use of white phosphorus in view of the many grave and often lethal cases of necrosis — all this, alas, without much avail. On 4th January 1908 at a conference of the Royal Medical Society of Budapest, under the chairmanship of Gyula Dollinger, illustrious professor of surgery at the Budapest University, Friedrich gave account of the bewildering experience he had gained in a match factory near Budapest, for the mass occurrence and lethal outcome of phosphorus necrosis. The next contributor, József Lévai, surveyed his large number of patients from the surgeon's point