User:DeliriousWolf/sandbox3

Family
My maternal grandfather and his three sons were all doctors, and on my father’s side a Bamberger, my great uncle, was one of the pioneers of the Vienna medical school. My mother’s family came from Alt-Ofen, a mediaeval settlement on the Danube not far from Budapest. My grandmother, nee Spitzer, had an uncle named Moses, an incorrigible sailor. He won some fame in the scientific world of his day by sailing round the world on no less than three occasions. My maternal great grandmother came from the priestly tribe of Loewi. One of her uncles left Alt-Ofen as the result of a pogrom, and ended up in England, where he settled down, changed his name to Lion, and produced the female child afterwards to go into history as the notorious Lady Hamilton, who, despite, or perhaps because of, her defiance of deep-rooted social conventions, exercised no small influence on the history of this country.

Three of my mother's brothers were no home-keeping youths. The oldest went to Egypt and then to Syria, and finally to Bucharest, where he worked as a doctor and an exponent of the Vienna school. The youngest went through the Bosnian campaign in 1870 as a regimental doctor, whilst the second brother, Alexander, fought on the side of the Turks for twenty years in all the Balkan wars, until finally he established himself in Budapest. This uncle played a decisive role in my life. He arrived home with a small fortune and took over the practice of my grandfather in what was then a smallish village known as New Pest, though his main interest was in dentistry, which was then rapidly beginning to take the shape we know to-day.

My brother, eighteen months older than myself, was suffering from very severe rickets. Uncle Alexander had his own ideas about the requisite treatment. He took the patient, and me with him as a playmate, to New Pest, where, with the assistance of a widowed and childless aunt of ours, and our grandmother, he effected a cure primarily with raw meat and sun baths. That was what the modern vitamin treatment for rickets looked like in those early days as seen from the village of New Pest. New Pest became practically our home, and when we visited our parents in Buda-Pest it was more or less as guests. The result was that I grew to regard my uncle and aunt as father and mother, and my father and mother as uncle and aunt. My relationship to my sisters was also more that of a cousin than a brother. It was only when I was eleven and my parents had a new son, introduced to me as my brother, that I began to realize more clearly the truth of my family relationships. In any case, when I take stock of my feelings now it is quite clear that my uncle and aunt were nearer to me in relationship than my mother and father.

In my early childhood I enjoyed all the love and care at the hands of my uncle and aunt that most children find in the home of their parents.

My grandfather left no fund of scientific or medical knowledge behind him, but quite a lot of poetry, which my mother was accustomed to recite on suitable occasions right into her declining years.

My paternal great grandfather felt no attraction for science or medicine. He went in for brewing, and from very small beginnings he made a very good thing out of it, and afterwards used much of his quite considerable fortune to found a number of charitable institutions and establish the first Freemasons’ Lodge in Hungary. All of which appears to have contributed greatly to his popularity, for I can even remember an inn called ‘‘The Good Old Plesch”. It was whilst living in this inn that Carl Goldmark composed his famous opera “The Queen of Sheba”, whose music is largely based on Hungarian folk-song motives. As so often happens, the old gentleman’s sons played skittles with his fortune, and when it came to my father’s turn it was more a case of saving what was still to be saved. This he did, and more, for he succeeded in building up the business again. He was a man of some capacity, but his bent was towards art and literature rather than business, and when he died, which he did at the early age of 53, he could at least feel with satisfaction that there was little he had missed in life.

Early life
Owing to my uncle’s earlier affiliations, many Turks came to our house as visitors, chiefly when they were making their pilgrimage to the grave of Guel Baba, once Governor of Hungary under Turkish rule and a sort of Saint for the Moslems. In consequence, Turkish was often spoken at home, and what I retained of it stood me in good stead later. From my grandmother I learnt German, with the servants I chattered in Slovakian, and from my Bucharest cousins, with whom I was later educated, I picked up quite a smattering of Roumanian.

As I have said, I grew up in New Pest as the playmate of my older brother, and when he went to school I went with him, more for the fun of the thing, and to be with him, than anything else. In the upshot I remained with him throughout our whole school period, and for twelve years, right through to the University, I shared the same school-bench and learned from the same books. I was not yet five when I first went to school, and in consequence I missed some of the joys of childhood. It meant very hard work for me to keep up with boys eighteen months older, and the unequal struggle went on well into high school.

What little free time I had was devoted to music. The organist of the village church had taught me to play the piano. By the time I was nine years old I was accepted by the Budapest Conservatorium, and I was, already able to play a number of classical compositions — after a fashion.

I entered the world of artistic creation for the first time when, as a child, I was permitted to help actively in the making of hussars and peasant girls out of dough in a neighbouring bakehouse. A further stage in the process permitted me to decorate cheeks, lips and top-boots with a red and sugary pigment. In the local choir a lusty voice, I earned 10 kreutzer every Sunday. But all these innocent pleasures came to an end when we had to go back to town in order to go to High School, Hungary was culturally backward, and the standard of education was low. My teachers were themselves wretchedly educated and trained, and, what was very much worse, their attitude to their pupils was hopelessly wrong. They seemed to think that the best way to control their classes was by harshness and severity and an unapproachable reserve. There was no attempt to treat a pupil as an individual and no understanding for individual characteristics. In those days the educational system was in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities, and therefore great importance was attached to religious and classical subjects, whilst the natural sciences were very much neglected. This was particularly so in the Catholic High School in which I was educated.

The teachers hardly knew the individual pupils. Each pupil was called upon not more than two or three times in a whole term, and his answers were used to establish a rough sort of classification. Our teachers got up to all sorts of tricks in order that we should not be able to calculate when we were likely to be called on. With professional sadism they developed a technique for picking on those who were least prepared. The sigh of relief of fifty-nine pupils when the sixtieth was called upon was almost audible. The nervous anxiety of the whole class until it became clear who was to be the victim seemed to satisfy some sadistic lust in our teachers. And of justice there was very little. Favouritism was rife, and the sons of rich or influential fathers were privileged. Arbitrary treatment of this kind left its mark. Small wonder then that I have no very pleasant memories of my schooldays. And I never looked back at them with any regret for their passing. On the contrary, the eight years of fear and anxiety they represented have never gone entirely from my memory, and I have suffered them again in nightmares even as an adult.

History was completely emasculated, and, in particular, all mention of any movement or rebellion for freedom was sternly expunged. And with good reason, for the Habsburgs were right in regarding their Hungarian subjects as potential rebels. Hungarian children were not to be encouraged in that direction, not even by the knowledge of indisputable historical facts. Libertarian ideals were to be banished even from the imagination. The result of this suppression was, as one might have expected, exactly the contrary. Adorned with the national cockade, we met together secretly to brood over immature plans for freeing Hungary from Habsburg tyranny. However, nothing very serious resulted from these youthful conspiracies though somewhere around 1890 it was decided at one such conventicle that all signs in German should disappear from the streets, and then, whilst the Hungarian police looked the other way, bands of youthful patriots roamed around painting out every German sign they came across. This went on for about a fortnight, by the end of which time Budapest had been thoroughly Magyarized. This rise of nationalism met inevitably with repression, and so the game went on. But from a game it became deadly earnest, and it ended only with the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy.

One day in a cafe we youngsters persuaded the gypsy band to play patriotic Hungarian melodies in order to annoy a group of Austrian officers. We succeeded, and they then insisted that the band should play Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser^ to the playing of which we had to stand up. The result was that although we had to stand up the whole time and were unable to chatter and drink, the officers had to stand to attention. The joke was on them, and they got tired of it before we did and took themselves off leaving us victors in the field.

I had no difficulties with the choice of a profession. I grew up amongst doctors, and from my earliest childhood I never had any other idea but to become a doctor myself.

On women
It would be an infamous injustice to prevent women from, having their say in public affairs or their part in public life. Without doubt there are many talented women who put the majority of men in the shade, women whose social and political judgment is much sounder than that of those male rivals whose right to exercise judgement in public affairs is derived purely from their sex, whilst talented women are forced to silence merely because they are women. The rivalry of the sexes continues in our own day. But when all the arguments for and against have been heard, one truth at least stands unshakeable: masculine intellectual development is slower than female. And this is a fact which should exercise greater influence on the educational field than it has done up to the present.

On education
The fatal cancer of our educational system is its over-formalization.