J. Antall szerk.: Medical history in Hungary 1972. Presented to the XXIII. International Congress of the History of Medicine / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 6. (Budapest, 1972)
I. Friedrich: The Spreading of Jenner's Vaccination in Hungary
E. Réti: Darwin's Influence on Hungarian Medical Thought 161 but even pain, struggle and death itself, in order to produce organisms of a higher perfection. By the theory of natural selection —as by raising a magic wand —we can explain all the different characteristics and phenomena of the organic world which relate to the shape and structure of plants and animals, or to their development, geographical distribution, and geological historical relations. Before Darwin the innumerable facts were just like a pile of scattered stones ; he had to came to raise them into a splendid palace for science." Margó went to see Darwin at his house. His writings on the visit again reflect his insistence on facts and truth. He concluded his description of the meeting with Darwin saying: "There was finally another rare gift of nature he had —rare in an explorer of nature —his lively imagination and speculative bent, something, however, that he was always able to temper with his great intelligence and to contain within the boundaries of exact science without ever trespassing the limits of sound induction. In all his life he was never given to excesses. This distinguishes him from the older scientists who worked on the solution of the great question, and from those more recent 'ultra-Darwinists' who, with mere deductions and reckless speculations would have lowered Darwin's theory to the status of natural-science dogma. The mighty weapons of Darwin which brought his theory to triumph were not the entangled cobwebs of speculation, nor empty bombasts, but real facts and inductions made on the basis of these facts. The invigorating sunlight of his spirit came from his quiet solitude gradually to flood the world with the brightness of progress. There is hardly anyone else in the history of science who struggled with so much courage and good fortune for a great truth, suppressed and scorned for centuries, as he, and who lived long enough to see this truth established —largely by his own efforts . At the same time he knew very well that it takes more than the selfless and persevering work of a single human life to arrive at the complete proof and verification of this truth." Jenő Jendrassik (1827—1891), the eminent Hungarian biologist, treated the problems of evolution, the beginnings of life, the origin of the species, and dealt with the mechanism of thinking and psychological life in his biological notes even more boldly than did Darwin. It is commonly known that Darwin in his On the Origin of Species or in any other work did not attempt to explain the genesis of life, although in one note he wrote conditionally about the derivation of the living from the lifeless. Jendrassik derived the development of life from the development of proteins. "For the time being we are unable to produce such carbon compounds, proteins. If, however, we accept this condition, then, after the foregoing exposition, we can see that the particles of such organic chemicals could have exerted an influence outward as if from a centre, an influence which extended, however, only to a certain point, and could be sustained only as long as this particle, through the absorption of matter, did not expand beyond a certain set limit ; after this division had to take place, as a result of which the former beings gave rise to new beings whose number must have been infinite in the primordial sea that covered the Earth."
