Observing, Naming, Denoting

The Writing Anthropology of Epidemics and Endemics in the Eighteenth Century Kingdom of Hungary

Abstract

The administrative measures of a comprehensive reform program introduced in Vienna, the centre of the Habsburg Monarchy, as well as in some regions located at significant distances from the centre itself should be deemed as a successful field of practice in relation to the considerable shifts taking momentum in Habsburg governance from the 1780s on. Physicians thus were compelled to gather reliable information on all kinds of medical issues arising in their daily practices in the different countries of the Habsburg Empire, as well as to process and arrange them in accordance with a previously set system of aspects communicated to them. Regular and specific information gathering, including their systematic processing with the help of various media of visualisation changing in time, i.e., running texts, tables, thereby made it possible for the central government to accumulate, filter, assess their contents and duly contribute to making stances and decisions on the basis of available and relevant information, normally brief, factual, concrete, topical and synoptic, in the imperial ’information centres’ such as the Chancery, the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna, or in the regional ones such the Council of Lieutenancy and the medical faculties of the University of Nagyszombat [presently Trnava, Slovakia], Buda and Pest.

This paper is concerned with the functioning, the complex purposes and the role of medical report-writing in Hungary, which can at the same time be deemed as a method, an empirical practice of cognition, a tool of ‘quality assurance’ as well as of network building, through the examples of endemics and epidemics.