Nemes János: Healing Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
A Look at the Past
A LOOK AT THE PAST Historical sources indicate that the Roman Emperors, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius already had sent their wounded and veteran legionaries for treatment here in Aquincum, the capital of the province of Pannónia. The remnants of the baths and the aqueduct at Aquincum testify to the early healing activity that went on here. The history of medical treatment in Hungary is more than a thousand years old. Here are just a few interesting examples. The skull found in the Benepuszta burial place, dating from the period of the Hungarian conquest in the 9th century, discovered in 1834, was found to be punctured. The tribe magicians (táltosok) used to perform puncturing to allow the evil spirits causing the illness escape through the hole. Because many people seem to have survived these “operations” it is likely that the ancestors of today’s doctors were able to cure skull injuries successfully. The skull found in the Vereb tomb dating from the same period confirms this: a large missing part of the skull was replaced by a plate of silver. This technique remained unchanged for centuries worldwide, though the conditions did become more civilized, however. The crown of King Stephen, founder of the Hungarian State, was a gift from Sylvester II, the pope who himself was a doctor. Only a few decades later Benedictine monks founded the first rudimentary hospitals, the so-called xenodochiums. The first Hungarian hospital was built in 1240 in Eger. Pest-Buda’s first medical institution, Saint Jacob’s Hospital, founded by the Cistercian order is described by the medieval historian, Schier: “There liveth a noble man in the village of St Elizabeth, next to Pest. And a young man was he and he liveth in the hospital of Lady St Elizabeth under St Gellért’s Hill.” In the records of Saint Margaret’s trial the Inquisition mentions this hospital, in connection with one of its patients. We shall skip the all-devastating invasion of the Tatars in the 13th century, and the dark Middle Ages, although Hungarian medical science was always in line with the 7
