[On the beginnings of sixteen-century science in Hungary]

Among the 222 letters by Gáspár Fraxinus to Count Nádasdy that have been recently published by T. Vida and T. Grynaeus (Budapest 1988), some 88 are concerned with or at least mention medical therapies and pharmaceutical practice. The authors examined the scientific terms and usage of the correspondence, and corroborate and detail the findings of Botta about the emergence of pharmaco-botanical education in the Nádsdys chateau at Sárvár during the first half of the XVIth century. The first scientific writer of this school interested in botany and medicine was the Hungarian humanist and teacher, the translator of the New Testament, Johannes Sylvester (Erdosi Sylvester János). In his book, the Grammatica Hungaro-Latina (1539) and in his translation of the New Testament (1541) he was the first to publish texts in Hungarian that referred to plants and maladies. The leading figure of the school, however, was Caspar Fraxinus (Szegedi Korös Gáspár), the humanist physician and friend of the Italian A. Fracantianus and P. Matthiolus. According to his letters, the authors suppose that he might have been the tutor of Peter Melius (Somogyi Juhász Péter), and Georg Lenczius (Váradi Lencsés György), whom both became respected scholars later on. Melius made name for himself as the writer of the first pharmaco-botanical monograph in Hungarian (Herbarium, Kolozsvár, 1578). Lenczius, on the other hand, wrote exhaustively in his six-volume Ars medica (Gyulafehévár, 1570-90) about theoretical and practical medicine. Though inventively arguing in favour of the connections between Fraxinus, Melius and Lencsés, the main contribution of the article is rather the collection of pharmaceutical and botanical terms that appeared in letters of these persons who visited Sárvár, or even stayed there. The authors give a set of thoroughly elaborated indices, about medical plants and herbs, (either in Latin or Hungarian), about medicaments and drugs, names of illnesses and anatomical terms; about the suggested or used therapies, the names of famous physicians and scientists, etc. By the use of these lists the detailed scientific knowledge and medical education of these late Renaissance characters are perfectly raised.