Varga Benedek szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 147-148. (Budapest, 1994)

TANULMÁNYOK - ESSAYS - Antall József: Az orvostörténelem helyzete Magyarországon (magyar és angol nyelven)

of any personal promotion, perform a creative work on such an internationally accepted level, with often better results, than those from the esteemed professions. In lack of the organizational network of medical historical scholarship, and its possible impulses we can not expect any better results that have so far been archived by the Orvostörténeti Közlemények. In case of the Orvosi Hetilap, it does not have such a well-founded financial background to provide its readers with better foreign book reviews or publications of foreign articles, because it would charge the editorship with the expenses of copyrights and the costs of translations. IV. The Social Sciences Department of the MTA in co-operation with the Ministry for Cultural Affairs elaborated a project entitled "The revelation, recording and publication of the documents of the Hungarian culture", which would finance long run researches. The targets of this project were detailed by Tibor Klaniczay in the weekly Kritika (1980. 10.). In point 6 Klaniczay declares that ' 'The investigation of the history Hungarian education and science are among the most neglected areas when studying the documents and values of Hungarian past." He also points out that the work of this project is going to be achieved by the institutes of the MTA and the Ministry for Cultural Affairs, and it will include national collections, and the three faculties of arts of the universities. Other institutions, which belong to different ministries, or local authorities (such as museums or archives) and even scientific societies can contribute to this project as well. Since the SOMKL is supervised by both the Research Department of the Ministry of Public Health, and the Collection Department of the Ministry for Cultural Affairs, and because the Medical Historical Society is a member of the MOTESZ there can be no obstruction to have them involved in this project. It is eminently needed, however, to erect on this base a Committee for the History of Medicine within the MTA, which could unite scholars with academic degrees, and those active and outstanding researchers, who have published exhaustively on this field for years. Without an appropriate financial background there is little prospect for a remarkable contribution to this project. The outcome could be a representative book on Hungarian medical history and public health. We should again urge for the introduction of compulsory lectures at the four medical universities and at the OTKI (including courses on the history of dentistry and pharmaceutics), with adequate organizational background alike. A comprehensive report was made by a subcommittee, set up by the Hungarian Society for the History of Medicine which studied the means and strategies of the education of medical history at foreign institutions, and compared it to the Hungarian situation. This subcommittee also made suggestions how to put this subject into the curricula of medical universities, and how to create an adequate institutional network needed to fulfil this task. They regarded economic principles among their major objectives in this work. All in all, the whole Hungarian scientific and intellectual world ought to feel the importance of the historical view in shaping our common mind, in creative scientific thought. No matter that Hungarian academic life has been lead by active and noted figures of science history, even of medical history if medical historical scholarship can not meet the need of medical profession as well. The afraid of overburdening or over-tasking students has been characteristic not only for university but for secondary education for more than a century. Agost Trefort rightly pointed out during the sixteen years of his ministry for public education (1872—1888), that if the requirements of over-anxious critiques had been fulfilled, our whole system of secondary and higher education could not have produced better standards but which would only enough for baby sitters. As an alternative we can see the advance of scrappy and disjointed education in our days. Synthesis and theoretical approach are indispensable at least in the genesis of scientific progress. It is a common fact, though it has not been realized by narrow-minded pragmatism, which can not view broader perspectives when counting inspirational factors. The position of medical historical scholarship in Hungary is a result of all these dilemmas. If the esteem of the