Nemes János: Healing Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)

If you are in Need of Hospital Treatment

The capital has several children’s hospitals and two university teaching hospitals covering every area of medicine. They have in-patient departments as well as traumatologies. Thus, they treat victims of accidents, monitor or carry out operations (e.g. appendicitis) on children patients as well.

The two largest are Pál Heim Children's Hospital and Clinics (Address: i089 Budapest, vili, Üllői út 86. Tel.: 133-0718) and Madarász Street Children's Hospital and Clinics (Address: 1131 Budapest, xiii, Madarász u. 22-24. Tel.: 149-8I60)

Pest County Semmelweis (Rókus) Hospital

In 1792 the prefects of the city of Buda, after a long debate, accepted the bill proposing the founding and maintaining a hospital. This was the first step in the history of the hospital, built next to St Rókus Fogadalmi (Sermon) chapel. The church that still exists was built by the survivors of the 1711 plague. The hospital was completed in 1798, catering for 220 patients, which was enough for the thirty thousand inhabitants of Buda. It satisfied the demands and health conditions of the time. One of its side doors still bears the inscription: Peta- num Calamitosorum Domicilium, that is, “the Home of Pest Misery”.

The hospital earned a great reputation during its two-hundred-year-old history. It flourished in the second half of the 19th century when several professors of European fame, such as Semmelweis, surgeons such as Péter Bolya and Sándor Lumnitzer worked in it. (Lumnitzer introduced antiseptic surgery in Hungary and the artery forceps named after him are still used worldwide.)

Today this institution caters for patients from Pest county, although its reputation has somewhat diminished. Its ophthalmological ward is still world famous, however. It was the first place in Hungary to perform lens implantations on a large scale. This operation is carried out by the thousand annually.

In the early eighties the hospital underwent substantial renovation and a new wing was added. A new clinic was built also nearby. A German-Hungarian limited company called Mew-Contour Plastic Surgery (address: Budapest, Vili, Stáhly út 9/11. Tel.: 117-0798)

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