Magyar László szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 174-177. (Budapest, 2001)

KÖZLEMÉNYEK — COMMUNICATIONS - Tricot, Jean-Paul: The memory of today in the history of medicne. — (A ma emlékezete az orvostörténelemben.)

Fair and Jane of Castile. As archduchess of Austria she belonged to the Habsburg-house. She married in 1521 per procuratione at the age of 16 King Lewis II of Hungary, was crowned Queen of Hungary in December 1521 in Székesfekérvár and the official religious wedding took place in the Church of Our Lady in Budapest on the 13th January 1522. It was a rather short relationship because her husband, the last truly Hungarian king died at the age of 20 less then 5 years thereafter in August 1526 at the famous battle of Mohács, won by the Turkish sultan Suleyman I, the Magnificent. After Ferdinand of Habsburg became the new Hungarian King, the emperor Charles Vth recalled his sister Mary of Hungary to become the new regent of The Netherlands, a function she fulfilled from 1531 to 1555, the year when her brother transferred his royal power to his son, Philip II. Queen Mary of Hungary died in the Spanish town of Valladolid in 1558, a few months after her brother. Some years thereafter both of them were buried in the Escorial Palace near Madrid by Philip II. Mary of Hungary did a lot for the development of culture and science in our country. She had also a very rich library: some 390 books, 113 of them devoted to history and 65 of them to sciences. These figures are not negligible. Remember that when she became our regent in 1526, the invention of the art of printing by Gutenberg in 1434 was less then a century old. Books were rare and very expensive. In 1555, year within she left our country, a young French man of Tours, Christophe Plantin, started in my home town, Antwerp, with the exploitation of the most famous printing house of The Netherlands at that time, the "Officina Plantiniana". He printed 2450 different books of which 196 with a scientific content: 55 geography, 49 medicine, 32 physics, 23 astronomy, 22 botany, 13 mathematics and 3 the art of war. A very famous Hungarian humanist, Zsámboky, with the latin name of Joannes Sambucus, born in Tirnau in Hungary in 1531 and deceased in Vienna in 1584 published in 1574 at the Offcina Plantiniana a splendid book with the portraits of 67 scientists and physicians: Icones veterum aliquot ac recentium medicorum philosophorumque. Emil Schultheisz described this work in a paper presented at the XXXth Congress of the International Society of Medicine in 1986 in Düsseldorf. Other examples are the works of the Hungarian physicians and iatrochemists of the XVIth and of the XVIIth century Jean-David Ruland, Francois Pápai Pariz, Charles Rayger, Jean Apáczai Csere who certainly were influenced by the famous Belgian iatrochemist Jean-Baptist Van Helmont. This was stated by Back at the XXXIInd Congres of the International Society for the History of Medicine in 1990 in Antwerp. It can thus be stated that from the XVIth century onward the printed book became the support for the diffusion of general knowledge and of scientific knowledge in the whole civilized world. Before that the oral tradition together with the very few manuscripts limited the expansion of intellectual life essentially to the clergy and to a very selected cross section of the population. Even for the development of the medicine, the art of printing was a revolution. Medical knowledge became universal. Without printing presses the work of Vesalius, Paré, Harvey, Paracelsus, Sydenham, Boerhaave and so many other famous physicians on the one hand, and the translations of the Greek, Arabic and Hebraic authors on the other hand would not have been so quickly disclosed in so many countries in such a short lapse of time. Furthermore vernacular scientific literature quickly replaced Latin and medicine