Kronika naukowa
Report from the 12^th Annual Congress of the Hungarian Society of Cardiac Surgery

From the 3^rd to 5^th of November 2005 I participated in the 12^th Annual Congress of the Hungarian Society of Cardiac Surgery, which was held in Budapest. I had been invited by the organizing committee to present the history and current condition of the Polish cardiac surgery. I felt very pleased with the invitation. I decided to go there by car and I would recommend this way of transport for all the citizens from the southern part of Poland. All the sessions took place in the hotel Novotel Budapest Centrum (fig. 1), according to the program. The event was attended by 279 participants. The official language of the meeting was Hungarian, except of the sessions with invited speakers, which were held in English. The data presented in my lecture, concerning the current status and activity of the Polish cardiac surgery centers, impressed the participants, although, taking into account the number of cardiac surgery procedures in Hungary in relation to the number of citizens (fig. 2), there is still a space for the further developement in our country.
Thanks to courtesy of doctor Ferenc Tarr, the head the organizing committee, I have been given an opportunity to present the history and origin of the Hungarian cardiac surgery to our readers. In the early years of the XX century, due to certain political and geographical reasons, medicine and surgery in Hungary were strongly connected with the German and Austrian centers. Between the First and the Second World War a number of Hungarian surgeons gained international recognition and fame (Tibor Verebélyi, Tivadar Hüttl, Lajos Bakay, Gyula Sebestyén, Ferenc Czeyda-Pommersheim, Aladár Petz, Jenő Pólya). As in Poland, after the Second World War massive damages of the country and new international situation caused that the conditions for developing science were not particularly promising. Nevertheless, in the late 40s first attempts were made to introduce surgical procedures on the heart. The pioneer in this new field was Árpád Eisert, who in 1948 in Nyiregyháza (north-eastern part of the country) performed pericardiectomy in the constrictive pericarditis, in 1950 – first operation of the aortic coarctation and one year later, in 1951, first closed mitral commisurotomy. In 1949 József Kudász performed the first Blallock-Taussig procedure in a patient with a tetralogy of Fallot.
In the early 50s in the Second Surgery Department of the University of Pecs (southern...


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