Acta Biologica 46. (1995)
1. szám - G. Székely: János Szentágothai (1912–1994)
4 G. SZÉKELY chloroform anaesthesia in field-hospitals.) János Szentágothai (formerly Schimmert) attended the Medical School of the Budapest University in 1930, and half year later, at the end of the first semester, he joined the Anatomy Department as a distinguished student. The Department was chaired by Mihály von Lenhossék, he himself also the offspring of a great anatomist dynasty. He, Lenhossék, introduced Szentágothai's first scientific presentation to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1934. After graduation in 1936, Szentágothai remained in the Anatomy Department as a junior assistant, and received the title of privatdocent in neuroanatomy (venia legendi) six years later. After a short service in the army he was taken prisoner of war and returned home in 1946. The same year he was invited to the chair of the Department of Anatomy, Medical University of Pécs. The rest of his biography is closely associated with scientific activities. His first encounter with the nervous system was when as a highschool student caught a field mouse and put its brain into a Golgi fixative. "The best textile artist in the world could not possibly devise that marvellous pattern presented by the tangle of the fine processes of neurones against a yellow background"; as I try to translate his enthusiastic description of his first neurohistological experience. At his time in the Anatomy Department, the Neurone Doctrine debate was in its full, and the scientific era in Lenhossék's laboratories was especially favourable for the young promising scholar to devise a technique which became decisive not only in the questions of Neurone Doctrine, but was, for a long period of time, one of the most important tool in the investigation of neuronal interconnections. According to Neurone Doctrine, an axon separated from the cell body should degenerate, and Szentágothai showed this in the vegetative groundplexus. With this axon-degeneration technique he showed, for the first time, the anatomical basis of the monosynaptic reflex arc, and the drawing of the hitherto unknown scientist was taken over in the great international physiology handbook by J. F. Fulton one year after the publication in 1948. As he had arrived in Pécs, in the devastating misery after a lost war, Szentágothai started working with incredible optimism and enthusiasm which fascinated a group of young men who while still spending a good part of the day in classroom benches, formed the core of the scientific staff. The only member of the staff with a MD degree was Tibor Kiss who came to Pécs with Szentágothai shortly after his graduation in Budapest. He became later professor of surgery in the Pécs University. Szentágothai's inventiveness overcame the handicap of the virtually empty laboratories. With a pair of