Schultheisz Emil: Traditio Renovata. Tanulmányok a középkor és a reneszánsz orvostudományáról / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 21. (Budapest, 1997)
24. Short history of epidemics in Hungary until the Great Cholera Epidemic of 1831
Z^oo¡ in general history (but also in medical history). It was in fact in addition to its original sense a covering notion for typhoid raging in a particularly bad form (both for typhoid and for the essentially different enteric fever) but also for quite a series of epidemic diseases, thus e.g. also for syphilis. Plague is actually the "model" of classic epidemics. Other epidemic diseases did not penetrate so deep either from the demographic, or economic point of view or in other respects as the plague did. We mention as example leprosy, just because it declared itself at the start already in a less acute form, than the plague, and took incomparably less victims, but it lasted for decades without the least hope of recovery. We have no reliable data showing whether in Hungary a devastating mass epidemic, spreading over considerable parts of the country had broken out prior to 1241, that is to say before the Mongol hordes invaded and practically completely devastated this kingdom. From the text of master Simon Kézai, ¦ the Hungarian chronicler living in the XHIth century it appears that the defeat suffered by the German emperor Henry III from the Hungarian king Andrew had been caused by the many cases of malaria having broken out among the German troops, who fought around Székesfehérvár in Central Hungary, but we have no data on the proportions of death caused by malaria at that time. Leprosy took in Hungary many victims in the Xlth century similarly as in other states of Europe and until the XlVth century the cases of leprosy rose more and more. Cases of leprosy occured in Hungary sporadically and in certain parts of Hungary also in the XVI — XVIIIth centuries. It can be established very easily how rife this disease had been in Hungary already before the XVIth century, in addition to documents and other relics, from the old Hungarian names of villages showing concretely the existence of leper colonies in them, or that these unfortunate people sought ease from the medicinal springs in the neighbourhood. Around 1265 lepers had an entire village for them near river Répce in Western Hungary. The relatively high number of leprosoria also proves the incidence of this disease. There having remained no notes on the symptoms we do not know what the epidemic following the Mongol invasion in 1241 had been, but we absolutely share the views of the Hungarian historian György Győrffy who attributes in the death of 50% of the population of Hungary a decisive role to epidemics, in addition to the famine following the Mongol invasion, the decrease in the number of births after it and to the high infantile mortality 2. The epidemic of plague, the "Black Death" imported into Hungary in the XlVth century and ravaging here from that time on for centuries at different times with more or less violence had an incomparably greater, universal effect than these epidemics in Hungary, which cannot be neglected, but whose facts are little known. The Black Death spread along the trade road leading from Italy through the Brenner and appeared in the summer of the same year already in German territories. In 1349 it raged in Central and Northern Germany, France, England and even in the south of Norway, while it got only in 1352 to Poland and then to Russia 3. Hungary got very quickly into contact with the plague. In fact it was owing to the epidemic of plague that king Louis the Great, of the house of Anjou, interrupted in 1347 his 1 M. Simonis Keza: Chronicon Hungaricum, quod ex codice membranaceo ... excitat Alexius Ĥórányi. Viennae, 1781. 2 Győrffy Gy. : The population of Hungary from the Magyar conquest of Hungary till the middle of the XVIth century (in: Historical demography of Hungary, Budapest, 1963, p. 54 — in Hungarian). 3 Guthrie, D.: A History of Medicine. Edinburgh-London, 1958. 127.
