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

came soon popular. Later he was ordered to leave Vienna because of his seances. He removed to Paris (1778), where again he was stigmatized as a charlatan, and a commission of physicians and members of the Academic des Sciences was set up to investigate the phenomena observed in his seances. The elaborate report drawn up by Benjamin Franklin, R. Baillie and others admitted many of the facts, but contested Mesmer's theory as a whole and attributed the effects to physiological causes. Mesmcr was soon denounced as an impostor, left Paris and settled in Switzerland, where he died a couple of years later. John Brown (1735-1788), a Scottish physician, studied and lectured at Edinburgh may be considered as another inventor of strange ideas. Though he was not a mystic like Mesmcr, he also formulated a special theory called the Brunonian theory of medicine or theory of excitability, in his Elementų Medicinae (1780). Francois Joseph Victor Broussais (1772-1838), a French physician, who was an assistant professor to the military hospital in the Val-de Grace, developed an entirely original system, called the vampirism. He announced his peculiar doctrines on the relation between 'life' and 'stimulus' and on the physiological interdependence and sympathies of the various organs in his Examen de la doctrine médiçaié généralement adoptée (1816). In the show-case we have exhibited a skull-model by Joseph Gall (1758-1828) with his diagram showing the localization of the supposed centres of the mental faculties in the brain. This inventive theory, the phrenology, faced with fierce opposition from his colleagues. The cartoon you can see in the show-case refers to these disputes. Nevertheless, Gall could be considered as a forerunner in the localization of various brain functions. Among the manifold theories the homoeopathy of Fridrich Samuel Hahnemann (1775-1843) has been one of the survivors. It has followers even today, all over the world. The idea, formulated as similia similibus curantur (similar to be treated by similars), found its several followers in 19th century Hungary as well. Pál Almas¿ Balogh (1794—1867), the private doctor of Lajos Kossuth and Count István Széchenyi¦ Döme Argenñ (1809-1893) and Gusztáv Jármaÿ (1716-1890) a pharmacist from Pest, who had had made homoeopathic pocket medicine cases, were among the more famous. Several series of his medicines are exhibited. Next to the show-case the lines of Mihály Vörösmarty, the great Hungarian poet of the 19th century, can be read in praise of Hahnemann. X. Development of pharmacy ¡n Hungary in the first half of the 19th century Hungarian pharmacies were in unfavourable conditions during the first six decades of the 19th century. The Crown's policy was in many aspects arbitrary and Vienna preferred to carry out the centrally regulated plans and orders on her own. 62