Szilárd Donhoffer (1902–1999)

T he authors summarize the main events in the long life of Szilárd Donhoffer and his importance in founding thermoregulatory research at Pécs, Hungary. We, two pupils and disciples of Professor Szilárd Donhoffer, wish hereby to recognize and honor his transcendent contributions to experimental physiology and pathophysiology in general, and to thermoregulatory research in particular. Prof. Donhoffer's manifold achievements in research were based on a strong premedical and medical education, more than two decades in clinical practice and a very productive period conducting laboratory work abroad. His almost full one century-long life can be divided into four quarter-century periods: the first spent on his formal education, the second engaged in medical practice, the third committed to the founding and development of the Department of Pathophysiology in Pécs, and the last dedicated to mentoring his successors in the Department in their efforts to extend and carry forward his scientific legacy. Szilárd Donhoffer was born in 1902 in Budapest to a traditional, well-to-do, intellectual family. His early education included acquiring, in addition to a firm knowledge of the natural sciences, a high level of proficiency in foreign languages (particularly German and English) that later served him well in his readings of the foreign literature and communications with colleagues at international congresses. After graduating in general medicine at the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest in 1926, the young Dr. Donhoffer was invited to a junior clerk-ship in a hospital in Pécs, a part of the then recently re-established University of Pécs one of the oldest in Europe having been founded in 1367. Two years later, he was sent to Aberdeen, Scotland, where he worked under the guidance of Nobel laureate Professor John MacLeod. His one-year's studies there on the regulation of carbohydrate metabolism resulted in a significant three-part publication that appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. 1 His period as a clinician was very active. He not only headed a ward, but also authored several clinical reports that were published in German or English as well as an excellent book on medical diagnostics in Hungarian that remained very popular with medical students and young doctors alike for several decades. All this expertise eventually contributed to his instituting a new discipline in the medical curriculum, Pathophysiology. Consequently, he was chosen by the Senate of the University of Pécs to inaugurate a department by this name shortly after the end of the Second …