Social Hygiene and Public Health in Hungary and Romania, 1920–1940

Abstract

Hintergrund: Between 1920 and 1940, social hygiene and public health in Hungary and Romania received sustained support from both the state and international organisations. The Rockefeller Foundation played a decisive role in this process. Following the political and situation of 1918–19 in Central and Eastern Europe, attempts were made by the victorious powers to establish a cordon sanitaire against communism and the resurgence of German nationalism. Ziel: The Rockefeller Foundation offered an alternative vision of medical protection and financial support, one based on programmes of social hygiene and public health. The establishment of Institutes of Hygiene in Hungary and Romania was part of such programmes, in addition to offering training in modern methods of public health service for physicians and nurses. Numerous grants and fellowships, as well as direct financial contribution towards the costs of the new institutions were offered with the general aim of creating a group of professional experts, who were to become – and many had indeed become – responsible for public health administrations in their native countries. The innovative scholarship on the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation in Hungary and Romania fashioned by Gábor Palló, Paul J. Weindling, Maria Bucur, Ecaterina Petrina and Mircea Cornesco notwithstanding, there is much to be done in terms of understanding the role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in shaping social hygiene and public health policies in interwar Hungary and Romania. My project aims to compare scientific research and medical programmes supported and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation in Hungary and Romania. Methoden: The first method to be used in this paper is the comparative one. The second method is that of social history. Finally, the general methodological approach adopted stresses the complex nature of the production of medical knowledge and of political and intellectual discourses. Ergebnisse: Accordingly, my paper will focus on the following aspects: 1) the institutionalisation of social hygiene and public health (the main focus will be on the Institutes of Hygiene and Social Hygiene in Budapest, Bucharest and Cluj as well as the Biological Research Institute at Tihany); 2) the role played by Romanian and Hungarian recipients of Rockefeller scholarship and funding in articulating programmes of public health and implementing social hygiene policies (a special attention will be paid to individuals less discussed in existing scholarship like Béla Johann, József Tomcsik, Lajos Csik, Dimitri Combiescu, Petru Râmneanţu, and Sabin Manuilã); and, finally, 3) the relationship between Institutes of Hygiene and Social Hygiene in Hungary and Romania and governmental policies in the field of public health administration (in this context it is interesting to explore the role played by national context in shaping different social hygiene and public health policies in Romania and Hungary during the political changes of the late 1930s). Diskussion / Schlussfolgerungen: This paper places the relationship between social hygiene and public health in Hungary and Romania in a comparative and transnational perspective. The time has come for the integration of the history of social hygiene and public health in Central Europe into the general narrative about the history of medicine and philanthropy, thus eliminating what constitutes a fragmented and unilateral interpretation of these issues in the scholarship.