Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 18-19. (Budapest, 2000)

Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts - Guide to the Exhibition

early in Hungary. One of the earliest example of the latter were found in the excavations of the 14th century royal palace of Visegrád. Whereas in most European countries public baths usually had smaller pounds and bathing tubes, in Hungary public baths with big pounds, combined with sweating rooms and showers have been preferred since the Middle Ages. Another Hungarian invention was to couple the so called dry air chamber (a Roman, later Turkish custom) with the sweating room (Russian or Scandinavian type). Aquincum, the chief city of Roman Pannónia, was famous about its baths all over the Empire. There used to be five baths in the military and six public and private baths in the civil part of the city. One of the military baths beneath the today Flórián Square (in Óbuda), which was excavated in the times of Queen Maria Theresia, had had an own hospital, where patients were cured with special thermal water. We have illustrated the Roman balneum with an etch of Georg Christoph Kilian (1709-1781), made in 1767. According to some records during the period of the Árpád dynasty the religious medical orders erected baths next to many of their monasteries. The first public bath in medieval Hungary was founded by St. Stephen (1000-1038) in 1007, next to the xenodochion (hospital) of Pécsvárad. Four nurses and six servants worked there. Another steel plate of Rohbock commemorates the hospital and bath of the Johannita Military Order north to Buda, which had been founded in 1178 and was still in use, by the name of Császármalmok (Kaisermühler), in the 19th century. The most important builder of Turkish baths in Buda was Pasha Sokollu Mustapha, a renegade Hungarian beglerbei of the province. He had had the today Rudas and Király (King) Baths built between 1565-1578. According to the Turk Evlia Czhelebi, a famous traveller of the 1660s, there were nine ilijes (baths) in Buda and further two in Pest in 1663. The Turkish baths are illustrated with an engrave of the Rudas Bath by Lajos Rohbock (1857) (No.

3.). Mind you, some parts of this bath have been operating for more then three hundred years. The first book of a Hungarian author on balneology, was published in Basle in 1549. It was the Hypomnemation, de admirandis Hungáriáé Aquis (A Short Rewiew on the Wounderful Waters of Hungary) written by György Wernĥer, a constable of Pozsony city and royal advisor. In the middle of the 16th ccntury Tamás Jordán (1539-1585) gave an analysis on the medicinal waters of Trencsény (today Tren¿ín, Slovakia). These first attempts were followed by several works concentrating on the chemical analysis of thermal waters. The most significant ones have been presented in the show-case: János Torkos Justus (1699-1770) essayed about Pöstyén in 1745, Voita published a book about Szkleno in 1753. Ló'rinc Stocker's Thermographia Budensis (1721) was the first detailed guide on the Buda baths. In the following ccntury András Lugosi Fodor, head physician of Sáros county, wrote about Mehida (1844) and the last exhibited one is by Bálint Horváth, titled A füredi savanyúvíz etc (The Acid Water of Füred) (1848). A systematic elaboration began in the 1770s, when Queen Maria Theresia pointed out Heinrich Johann Crantz (1722-1799), a professor in medicine at Vienna, to collect data on all the mineral waters of the Habsburg Empire. His book, the 58