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)
J. Antall: State Interference and the Dilemma of Liberalism in the Field of Medical Training and Public Health
48 Medical History in Hungary 1972 (Comm. Hist. Artis Med. Suppl. 6.) him to introduce it. His earlier bill on elementary education had encountered so many difficulties that his successors, the pragmatic Ágoston Trefort did not want to introduce the bill on secondary and higher education, but preferred to execute its main provisions through decrees. Here he was greatly helped by Markusovszky. In addition to practical measures like the construction of new university buildings and clinics the primary aim was to create a unified system of medical training: the termination of the seperate training of surgeons and physicians, and in general to do away with all differences inside the university. Thus with the basic laws and decrees concerning public health and medical training the liberal legislation and regulation of the field was completed in the decade between 1867 and 1876. It created a firm basis for further work: to catch up in scientific research with the leading European countries, and for the birth of new schools in the specialized branches of medicine. Up to the end of the 1880's one can observe the close cooperation of the Minister, Trefort, with his councillor, the organizer of science and higher education, Lajos Markusovszky and with the talented József Fodor. Besides them an important role was played by the surviving members of the medical school of Pest; Sándor Lumniczer, Frigyes Korányi and others. The man who achieved the greatest international reputation, Ignác Semmelweis, who had shared with them the planning, did not live to see the years of realization as he died two years before the Compromise, and Balassa, too, lived only one year after the big deal. Summing up we can conclude that the modern health policy of Hungarian liberalism was unfolding in the last years of the Age of Reforms and during the revolution of 1848 and its practical implementation was started after the Compromise of 1867. Its development showed a more or less straight line and was represented by common intellectual aspirations in the first part of the dualist period, up to the years around 1890. During this period the spirit and principles of the great generation of reformers and practical experts still prevailed. Then the greatest figures, Trefort and Markusovszky died and the remaining ones withdrew from the scene. One cannot deny the outstanding scientific achievementes of the next years, life did not stop, there was further progress, but it was a different age. The time of classical liberalism was gone, its representatives disappeared and the great internal and external tensions of the turning of the centuries portended the coming of a new age and new problems. The deeply rooting social tensions, the growth of various social and political movements demanded new conceptions, new approaches, new endeavours. One generation finished its work; they had traversed the route from classical liberalism abhorring any interference to the acceptence and propagation of a policy of state interference implementing the necessary reforms, establishing a synthesis between the earlier views on liberty and the modern principles of state regulation. By this they solved the dilemma and accepted interference when it served noble aims.
