Hungary

Jenö Hirschberg, Budapest

The founding time of the Hungarian phoniatrics cannot be dated exactly. One may follow its origin and the stages of its development only on the bases of the common work of all board disciplines dealing with speech research and speech disorders. Phoniatrics in Hungary was established - as in many other countries - with the collective work of physicians with several disciplines (oto-rhino-laryngologists, neurologists, pediatricians) and of teachers in special pedagogics (in German: Heilpädagogen), logopedists (speech therapists), linguist-phoneticians, music pedagogues (singing-voice teachers), psychologists and acousticians to name a few. One cannot speak about the unambiguously real founder of this modern medical discipline in Hungary. To illustrate the Hungarian aspects of this science developing so rapidly and becoming more and more independent in our days, we must not forget the organising and research activity of many outstanding representatives of board disciplines. Special teachers for handicapped children, speech therapists, psychologists and phoneticians all take part today - whether alone or as co-authors - in the development of topics and in the solution of problems, belonging to the phoniatrics. One can greatly emphasise the reason for the existence of phoniatrics as a medical discipline. It must be acknowledged - however - that only teamwork may promise really new results and success in speech research, especially in small countries. The scientific work closely followed the organising activity of great personalities in the past. But the research work cannot be separated from practice, and the routine works either nowadays: therefore we summarise the historical review of Hungarian phoniatrics in threefold unity of the organisational, scientific and societal relations of this medical discipline.